"C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America" is an effective satire of History Channel-type documentaries.
To illustrate an alternative reality of the past hundred years as if the Confederacy had won the U.S. Civil War (with foreign help) through a faux British TV documentary, writer/director Kevin Willmott makes excellent use of detailed research and archival footage to seamlessly create dead-on parodies of decades of movie styles (D.W. Griffith here makes "The Yankee" instead of "The Clansman", to a 1930's style hagiographic bio pic of Jefferson Davis, to a World War II-style movie here set in a war to take over South America as the Confederates dreamed to do, etc.).
Particularly chilling throughout this supposed televised presentation are the "commercials" of racist products and horrifically cheerful slave controls, where ads for reruns of the old sit com "Beaulah" fit in comfortably (the syndicator may now pull this one just as CBS keeps "Amos and Andy" in the vault as she sure does look like a mammy). The footnote coda chillingly demonstrates that representations making use of the most exaggerated stereotypes were not fictional but were actual racist artifacts or activities, though producer Spike Lee also used them in his parallel "Bamboozled" of a satirical TV minstrel show taken at face value. (A recent episode of "Nip/Tuck" also had a pleasant extremist mom have an Aunt Jemima collection.)
Some of the historical imaginings are creatively scabrous, such as exporting slaves to get the U.S. out of the Depression, and raises intriguing issues of slavery in an industrial economy. The film is particularly nasty about "traditional values" and Christian hypocrisy. While there are many "Daily Show"-type jokes, there is plenty that can't be laughed at.
The script's imagination falls flat and finally trails off as it imagines how a CSA would fare in world affairs, spreading its racist gospel to the Japanese and the Africans, less thought out than Philip Roth's take on allying with the Nazis and what the U.S. actually did to Japanese-Americans was worse than described here. But it's not always clear what this CSA's foreign policy would have been, other than "Red Canada" where the talking head black scholars can lash out from the safety of Montreal.
A story-telling mechanism of the film that falters into personalities as it heads into the 1970's is focusing on a fictional first family of the Confederacy who is meant to be the Adamses or Kennedys in public service, with plenty of borrowings from the life of Dixecrat Senator Strom Thurmond.
Until it fades off, this is a very sophisticated and imaginative satire.
To illustrate an alternative reality of the past hundred years as if the Confederacy had won the U.S. Civil War (with foreign help) through a faux British TV documentary, writer/director Kevin Willmott makes excellent use of detailed research and archival footage to seamlessly create dead-on parodies of decades of movie styles (D.W. Griffith here makes "The Yankee" instead of "The Clansman", to a 1930's style hagiographic bio pic of Jefferson Davis, to a World War II-style movie here set in a war to take over South America as the Confederates dreamed to do, etc.).
Particularly chilling throughout this supposed televised presentation are the "commercials" of racist products and horrifically cheerful slave controls, where ads for reruns of the old sit com "Beaulah" fit in comfortably (the syndicator may now pull this one just as CBS keeps "Amos and Andy" in the vault as she sure does look like a mammy). The footnote coda chillingly demonstrates that representations making use of the most exaggerated stereotypes were not fictional but were actual racist artifacts or activities, though producer Spike Lee also used them in his parallel "Bamboozled" of a satirical TV minstrel show taken at face value. (A recent episode of "Nip/Tuck" also had a pleasant extremist mom have an Aunt Jemima collection.)
Some of the historical imaginings are creatively scabrous, such as exporting slaves to get the U.S. out of the Depression, and raises intriguing issues of slavery in an industrial economy. The film is particularly nasty about "traditional values" and Christian hypocrisy. While there are many "Daily Show"-type jokes, there is plenty that can't be laughed at.
The script's imagination falls flat and finally trails off as it imagines how a CSA would fare in world affairs, spreading its racist gospel to the Japanese and the Africans, less thought out than Philip Roth's take on allying with the Nazis and what the U.S. actually did to Japanese-Americans was worse than described here. But it's not always clear what this CSA's foreign policy would have been, other than "Red Canada" where the talking head black scholars can lash out from the safety of Montreal.
A story-telling mechanism of the film that falters into personalities as it heads into the 1970's is focusing on a fictional first family of the Confederacy who is meant to be the Adamses or Kennedys in public service, with plenty of borrowings from the life of Dixecrat Senator Strom Thurmond.
Until it fades off, this is a very sophisticated and imaginative satire.