Last week, HBO Max removed the 1940 Academy Award Best Picture winner, “Gone with the Wind,” from its platform in response to director John Ridley’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, titled “Hey, HBO, ‘Gone With the Wind’ romanticizes the horrors of slavery. Take it off your platform for now.”
On Wednesday, HBO revived the film, this time providing both historical context and a condemnation of its depiction of the antebellum South by way of a short pre-film segment by Jacqueline Stewart—professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago and host of Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights.”
Of course, our film history is rife with such destructive depictions of people of…
