And the South in particular, in terms of land reforms, enfranchisement, and education, was not ready to change of its own accord. While some American historians have noted the important changes of freedmen and -women marrying establishing households, schools, and churches owning 20 percent more land during the Reconstruction years others emphasize that even so, the country did not solve the problem of race. The Ku Klux Klan together with the Black Codes terrorized African-Americans physically and deprived them of education and the legal franchise. From 1865-1867, white southerners made very little effort to welcome African-Americans into a reborn American society (symbolized by the historically altered Constitution).
While one could go back further, the contradictions of the modern liberal-race problem invoked by Von Trier date from the end of the Civil War. First, domestically: the historical debate about freedmen and resistance to them is important. Otherwise, this turns out to be one of the most ignominiously racist films since Birth of a Nation. All of these aspects should be considered through the lens of his Brechtian alienation techniques. In this sense, Von Trier's provocative film is perhaps above all else an indictment of American liberalism (or liberal individualism), domestically and globally. Resonances with Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and Absalom, Absalom can also be found in the simplicity of the white liberal Northerner's analysis and solution to race problems. It also matters for the history of white social and policy reactions to "the race problem," liberal and conservative responses, from segregation to integration, welfare to workfare, white flight to affirmative action. Should that matter? It matters in terms of Von Trier's audience (mostly American art cinema liberals and European intellectuals). But King was African-American and Grace is white. "We have a moral obligation," Grace says to her father, as she persuades him to loan her gangster firepower to oversee her reform initiative. White liberal American intellectuals will no doubt have a hard time resisting identification with the white do-gooder Grace, who, like the North, the Federal government, and the social worker, believes that race relations at Manderlay are in moral terms not a local matter. Her father asserts that this is a "local matter," echoing a common Southern response to Federal intervention in race problems that was often coded through "states' rights." It specifically recalls the language of Martin Luther King's powerful "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he responded to Southern clergymen who had accused him of, among other things, being a meddling outsider. She is alerted to the anachronistic existence of slavery by a slave who asks her for help. Continuing the narrative of Dogville, Grace (now Bryce Howard), after touring with her gangster father (now Willem Dafoe) and his thugs since her departure from Dogville, stumbles upon Manderlay with her father's entourage. On one level, the film is set in 1930s Alabama, on a plantation called Manderlay, where 70 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is apparently still being practiced. Von Trier has cited German playwright Bertolt Brecht (right) as an artistic inspiration yet one may wonder if he is reinventing the Brechtian wheel, one that Brecht himself admitted did not turn for others as he had wished. The film's complicated style and extreme plot produce intentional uneasiness. A condemnation of conservative racial politics is its point of departure. Yet, as I say, it is mostly a critique of American liberal politics. Others will find it a condemnation of Bush's war in Iraq. Some will walk away calling it racist and anti-American. Yet Manderlay is a complicated film that will produce multiple interpretations. 1967 "Dear (American) liberals, You're Idiots! Love, Lars." In a nutshell, that is the message of Manderlay, controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's latest effort. America must be born again!" Martin Luther King Jr. Von Trier's Brechtian Gamble On Manderlay This time "liberal" is a dirty word By Jayson Harsin "The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.
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