Gone With The Wind 1939 Quotes

More recently, the OED has defined nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for the past,” although this definition is imperfect and allows considerable latitude for the negative. After all, a sentimental longing for the past has variously given us Brexit, resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe and the US, and a Russian presidency that has more than a whiff of tsardom about it. For some, the past may be not only a nice place to visit but also to live. It is, perhaps, the difference between personal nostalgia, which draws on significant memories of family, friends, spouses, even pets, and a more generalized, dangerous nostalgia that peddles idealized fantasies of yesteryear, of a better past that didn’t even exist at the time. Culture as much as politics has a part to play in this, an example being the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, whose opening title crawl celebrated “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” which required one to ignore the 3,500,000 slaves held in the South by 1860, a situation that meant nine out of ten Black Americans were in a state of involuntary servitude. The title crawl did at least manage to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but only in a somewhat wistful manner: “Here,” it told us, “was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…

At the same time, black entertainers have long been rewarded and often restricted to roles that adhere to caste stereotype. The first African-American to win an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel, was commended for her role as Mammy, a solicitous and obesely desexed counterpoint to Scarlett O’Hara, the feminine ideal, in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. The Mammy character was more devoted to her white family than to her own, willing to fight black soldiers to protect her white enslaver.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Gone with the Wind is considered by some people to be the high point of the studio system . . . 1939 is called the greatest year in Hollywood history because so many famous movies were made and released in that time frame. But GWTW, as they call it, is boring and dated and politically offensive in some ways.

It's like Gone with the Wind or something. Strictly the 1939 brand of slapping. It only works because the slapper loves the slapee, and the slappee knows it.

ONE OF THE most popular books in Poland in the summer of 1939 was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind (1939), were actually made with Gable on loan to other studios,

More recently, the OED has defined nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for the past,” although this definition is imperfect and allows considerable latitude for the negative. After all, a sentimental longing for the past has variously given us Brexit, resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe and the US, and a Russian presidency that has more than a whiff of tsardom about it. For some, the past may be not only a nice place to visit but also to live. It is, perhaps, the difference between personal nostalgia, which draws on significant memories of family, friends, spouses, even pets, and a more generalized, dangerous nostalgia that peddles idealized fantasies of yesteryear, of a better past that didn’t even exist at the time. Culture as much as politics has a part to play in this, an example being the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, whose opening title crawl celebrated “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” which required one to ignore the 3,500,000 slaves held in the South by 1860, a situation that meant nine out of ten Black Americans were in a state of involuntary servitude. The title crawl did at least manage to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but only in a somewhat wistful manner: “Here,” it told us, “was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…” In 2020, when the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, much to the annoyance of U.S. president Donald Trump, it was to Gone With The Wind that Trump turned. "Can we get, like, Gone With The Wind back, please" he implored at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the 20th of February 2020. One could argue that what he was seeking was the revived celebration of epic filmmaking of a particularly American stripe. But while correlation does not imply causation, by 2023-2024 slavery denial had become a theme of Republican party presidential primaries. At a town hall meeting in Berlin, New Hampshire, on the 27th of December 2023, Nikki Haley, former governer of South Carolina, replied to a question about the cause of the Civil War by mentioning only "how government was run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do." Including, presumably, owning slaves, though she didn't specify that.

Spirit is a very peculiar concept which has in many cases lost its original character, but the history of the word spirit, or the German word Geist, tells us what it originally meant. The Greek word pneuma and the Latin word spiritus mean wind, and the Latin word animus is the same as the Greek word anemos, and they also mean wind. Pneuma is still the term in the Greek Orthodox church for the Holy Ghost, which is the sacred wind; it is a movement, a force. And Geist comes from a root which means to well up; it is a sort of enthusiasm, an emotional condition. The English word aghast is an emotional word which comes from it, and the word ghost is related to it. Geist was understood to be like a geyser, a welling up, an inspiration. In the miracle of Pentecost, all those symbolic phenomena are together; the fiery tongues mean the fire of enthusiasm: the apostles were like drunken people, and a powerful wind filled the house. That was spirit, but to us spirit has become something exceedingly lame and ineffectual, a mere two-dimensional picture — sort of beliefs or ideas that have no body and no force; one must believe them to give them any force. In the philosophy of Klages, one learns that the spirit is now the devil that destroys life, but he at least attributes a destructive power to it. And Scheler, who tried to restore a certain amount of importance to the spirit, made again a very lame thing of it; it is neither very destructive nor very effective. That powerful wind, which was destructive as well as generative or emotional, has gone. It is a poor thing with us now, no longer what it used to be. This process has come about within two thousand years. It was God in the beginning, and before that time it was latent in what man calls "God," that incomprehensible power in the depth of his own soul. And man supposes that this is in the depth of the universe in general because the microcosm is in no way different from the macrocosm; so what is in the depth of the soul was in the universe before, in that eternal source of life. Then it became visible or audible; it became the evangelion, the glad tidings, and people received it. But later it grew into an organization, so the effect was lost in created things. You see, the creative impulse comes to an end with the creation, just because it has become a creation; for a while there is no longer an impulse — until one has liberated oneself again from that which one has created. If one sticks to the creation, one will create nothing more. And so the time comes when the world is absolutely empty of spirit, when nobody knows what spirit is, when there are only the effects of the spirit — though those effects make visible efforts to remember the times when they were young, as old people like to speak about their youth just because they have it no longer. This descent which has happened to us within the last two thousand years, then, is the phenomenon to which Nietzsche here refers — of course in a more or less negative way. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 494-495). Princeton University Press.