Spike Lee’s "Miracle at St. Anna" Draws Ire of Italian Partisan Organizations, To Stage Protest at Film’s Italian Premiere

I don’t know how many people have gone out to see Spike Lee’s new movie “Miracle at St. Anna,” which bombed miserably at the weekend box office, but there is a controversy brewing in Italy. According to U.K.’s Times Online, Italian partisan organizations are to stage protests tomorrow at the Italian premiere of the film, which they say is full of lies, and insults the memory of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War.

Some have said that the film is very controversial. It is being shown first at Viareggio on the Tuscan coast, close to the village of Sant’ Anna di Stazzema in the Apennine hills above, where 560 civilians — including women and children — were murdered in cold blood in August 1944 by Nazi SS troops as they retreated northwards in the face of the Allied advance.

The movie, which highlights the role of African-American soldiers in the war, suggests that anti-Fascist partisans indirectly caused the atrocity by first taking refuge in the village and then abandoning the villagers to their fate. It even shows a partisan named Rodolfo collaborating with the Nazis. This runs directly counter to the accepted Italian version of events, which is that the slaughter was not a reprisal but an unprovoked act of brutality and that the hunt for partisans was a pretext.

The movie also questions one of the founding myths of Italy’s postwar democracy, which holds that the help the partisans gave to the Allies regained Italy the honour it had lost under Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator, by allying itself with Hitler and Nazi Germany. No doubt this has ruffled many feathers in Italy and I suspect the same for Italian-Americans as well.

James McBride, the black American Second World War veteran who wrote the novel on which Mr Lee’s film is based, said: “I am very sorry if I have offended the partisans. I have enormous respect for them. As a black American, I understand what it’s like for someone to tell your history, and they are not you.” He added: “But unfortunately, the history of World War II here in Italy is ours as well, and this was the best I could do … it is after all a work of fiction, not a history book.”

Spike Lee was also unrepentant, saying: “I am not apologizing for anything.” He told Italians that there was clearly “a lot about your history you have yet to come to grips with … This film is our interpretation, and I stand behind it.” Isn’t Spike Lee the same person who came down on Clint Eastwood about his movies “Letters from Iwo Jima” and “Flags of Our Fathers?”

According to Times Online, Lee said that the film, which follows the fate of four black GIs, was intended “to restore the voice of black soldiers who fought in the war.” He said that “not all Italians admired the partisans”, many of whom had fled to the mountains and left civilians to face the Nazis. “I have not invented anything,” he declared. The partisans in Italy feel that the film was a false reconstruction and a travesty of history and should not be tolerated.

The film has so far been given a mixed reception in the US, where in its first week it took only $3.5 million at the box office. Six former SS officers were sentenced to life in absentia three years ago for the Sant’ Anna atrocity. The prosecutions followed the discovery by a journalist in 1994 of a cabinet in the Rome military archives — dubbed “the cabinet of shame” — which contained evidence of war crimes hushed up by successive postwar Italian governments in order not to revive hostility towards Germany, by then a democratic member of the EU and NATO.

Well, I haven’t seen the movie, but for those of you who have, any thoughts?

Filed under: Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima, Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee

Clint Eastwood vs. Spike Lee Feud Continues

The feud between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee continues. I uncovered this article that points out that Lee is correct in his position and Eastwood is narrowly correct in his. The problem for me is that a lot of people feel as though Spike Lee is making this a racial issue and it is clearly a known fact that blacks have been deliberately erased from many films about the wars the U.S. was engaged in.

Brief summary……

The article the AP states that 63 years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted their flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time, acclaimed film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are engaging in verbal warfare over the verisimilitude of Eastwood’s two films about the epic clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling African-American contributions to the battle, Eastwood is misrepresenting history.

“Clint 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,” Lee said at the Cannes Film Festival. “In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist.” Eastwood’s counter: “Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn’t raise the flag,” he said. “If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they’d say, “This guy’s lost his mind.'” Eastwood also told Lee to “shut his face,” prompting Lee to amplify the racism charge: “[Eastwood] is not my father and we’re not on a plantation, either,” he fumed. “I’m not making this up. I know history.”

History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African-Americans played an instrumental role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped defeat the Axis Powers. Those efforts include significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African-American soldiers participated in the epic island battle, many of whom were Marines trained in segregated boot camps at Montford Point, within Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Those soldiers were restricted from front-line combat duty, but they played integral noncombat roles. Under enemy fire, they piloted amphibious truck units during perilous shore landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines, helped bury the dead, and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions even after the island had been declared secure. According to Christopher Moore, the author of a book about African-Americans’ myriad contributions during World War II, “thousands” more helped fashion the airstrips from which U.S. B-29 aircrafts could launch and return from air assaults on Tokyo, about 760 miles northwest. Hosting that air base, Moore says, was Iwo Jima’s primary strategic importance.
Eastwood’s portrayal of the specific battle is, if narrow, also essentially accurate. Flags Of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, and nobody disputes that this task, memorialized in a famous staged photograph, was accomplished by white servicemen. (His other entry in the Iwo Jima category, Letters from Iwo Jima, is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.)

Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island. That argument doesn’t placate Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of a book about African-American veterans. Black soldiers “had the most dangerous job,” she says. “If you were going to show the soldiers’ landing, you’d need to show [African-Americans] on the beach.” In Flags of Our Fathers, which shows the landing in significant detail, African-Americans appear only in fleeting cutaway shots and in a photograph during the film’s closing credits.

Moore lauds Eastwood’s rendering of the battle, but laments the limited role accorded to African-Americans. “Without black labor,” he says, “we would’ve seen a much different ending to the war.” View this article on Time.com. So, in a nutshell, for all those haters and detractors out there that state Spike Lee and other blacks, including myself, are making this racial is ridiculous. His statements are based on a fact. If we continue to ignore the contribution of blacks to the military and war time efforts, then we have done those soldiers and our children a great disservice. We have been erased from history for way too long and it is high time for us to change that. Just my thoughts, you be the judge……

Filed under: Clint Eastwood, Iwo Jima, Spike Lee

Clint Eastwood Tells Spike Lee to "Shut his Face" Over Lee’s Comments about Lack of Blacks in his Films

Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee have become embroiled in an argument of sorts that has escalated. You see, Clint Eastwood has told rival film director Spike Lee to “shut his face” after Lee complained on May 20th at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival following the premiere of a trailer for his new movie “Miracle at St. Anna.” Eastwood has rejected Lee’s complaint that he had failed to include a single African-American soldier in his films “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Both films are about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island. Eastwood justified his choice of actors saying that those black troops who did take part in the battle as part of a munitions company did not raise the flag. The battle is known by the image of US marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

“The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go: ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.” Referring to Lee, he added: “A guy like him should shut his face.” Now, is this any way for a man of such standing like Clint Eastwood to utter? But Spike Lee had a response to this: “First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either,” he told ABCNEWS.com about Clint Eastwood. “He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ — come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”

“If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist,” he said. “I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II.”

“I never said he should show one of the other guys holding up the flag as black. I said that African-Americans played a significant part in Iwo Jima,” he said. “For him to insinuate that I’m rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black … no one said that. It’s just that there’s not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.” Right on brother!

I must admit that I am not a big fan of either film directors, but Spike Lee has a valid point and Clint Eastwood is just plain wrong. Once again we have the powers that be trying to rewrite history and deliberately leaving blacks out of the picture. As Spike Lee said, try telling those African Americans who served at that time that they are not important. I am glad Spike Lee interjected because many people would have ignored this deliberate exclusion by Eastwood. From as far back as I can remember, American history has not been kind to blacks, who were often treated as second class citizens or erased from historical facts about meaningful contributions to the very fabric of the American landscape. I guess the “Dirty Harry” in Clint Eastwood came out, but this isn’t a fight I think he will win.

Filed under: Clint Eastwood, Iwo Jima, Spike Lee