CSA - The Confederate States Of America Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

compulsory viewing

Throughout, the satire is incredibly close to the bone, and all the better for it. It should alarm anyone that all the archive footage this fictional documentary uses is in fact real, including scenes of black slaves penned with cattle and vicious police brutality meted out to black rioters. That this alternative history seems so alien and yet is so recognisable eloquently makes the film’s many points about contemporary America.

The makers are clearly aware of how the documentary genre can disable our critical faculties, with experts wheeled out to make prosaic statements sound grave and important, irrespective of how ludicrous they are. This is certainly an important corrective to the Michael Moore School of documentary-making where truth becomes malleable and subject to some fairly wacky political views.

For the first time ever, I actually sat through the whole DVD commentary in which the director explains a lot of the history behind his alternative version and his reasons for shaping his counter-factual as he did. This constitutes almost a film in itself, and is well worth a look.

In all, a highly intelligent and often darkly amusing take on American society, politics and history. Seeing one interviewee after another blithely accept slavery and show off-hand disregard for the idea of abolition should make us think carefully about the ideas that are our own golden calves.

Interesting with a lot of ifs...

The problem with 'what if' or alternative history is that anyone's conjecture will be no more wrong or right than anyone else's. The film does explore the fascinating concept of the South winning the American Civil War and slavery was never abolished. It begins to fall apart when the documentary explores the 20th Century. We really have no way of knowing how Europe or Communism would have responded to a slave trade in America. The acting is pretty poor as are many of the ideas about the alternative history however the commercials are a real opener. At the end of the film a lot of the products advertised that portrayed blacks as slaves are real products that exist in our own history and that some are still in use today. Uncle Ben's rice anyone. What I found to be a little terrifying is that post 911 we seem to be very slowly moving towards the nightmare scenario that is the CSA. Pax Americana.