C.S.A. – THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA (USA, 2004).
Wednesday, 17th October 2007

USA, 2004. Directed by Kevin Willmott from his own screenplay.
Photography (Colour): Matthew Jacobson. Music: Kelly Werts and Erich L. Timkar.
Certificate: “12A”. Length: 89 minutes.
Leading Players: LARRY PETERSON (John Ambrose Fauntroy V),
EVAMARII JOHNSON (Patricia Johnson), RUPERT PATE (Sherman Hoyle), BENJAMIN VOGEL (John Ambrose II, Fauntroy’s son),
CHARLES FRANK (Narrator).

The placing of this film in our programme could not be more precise since we have deliberately chosen to screen it in between two movies, Mountain Patrol and Days of Glory, in which the visual impact is striking. In spite of its originality born of being based on the most ingenious of concepts, C.S.A – The Confederate States of America is an almost unknown film. Indeed it’s a work that on its release here disappeared virtually without trace, a fact that may in part have been due to some critics dismissing a movie that looked like a television programme. If so, that’s decidedly ironical, for part of the joy of this comedy lies in its marvellously acute sense of parody illustrated by the fact that it so convincingly masquerades as the TV documentary that it is supposed to be. Few films are daring enough to be built on an idea that makes the work at one and the same time intensely amusing (I found myself laughing out loud at certain moments) and deadly serious, and to underestimate the quality of C.S.A.- The Confederate States of America because it doesn’t look cinematic would be unfair to a work of distinction.

There’s a pointer to what this film is attempting in the presence in the cast list of the name of Spike Lee. No other film-maker has offered us so many movies charting the experience of black people in America. In this case, however, he merely presents the film, the actual direction being handled by someone unknown to me, Kevin Willmott, who came up with the idea and wrote the screenplay. His concept, one that explains the film’s title, has enabled him to comment on black lives in the States in a way that has never been done before. He started from a simple but startling premise: what might America’s subsequent history have been if the South had won the Civil War? Then, assuming that they had indeed triumphed, he goes on to construct a historical TV documentary that looks back on the eventful history of the Confederate States of America over almost a century and a half. In elaborating this notion, Willmott, who was born in 1958, brings to bear all of his experience as a writer, actor and director working in film and television, his skills as a playwright and the knowledge that has made him an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kansas. It’s this background that has resulted in a movie which successfully dares to bring together a measure of actual historical footage mixed with much fabricated material of various kinds and to blend them so as to create something unique.

Eschewing any broad touches that might make it seem unconvincing, C.S.A. – The Confederate States of America is presented to us as a transmission by Channel 6 San Francisco of a controversial but uncut TV documentary made in England by the British Broadcasting Service. The material in the programme consists of a history of America more or less in chronological order and covering the period from 1865, when the South’s victory led to them choosing Dixie as the national anthem, right up to the present day. We learn how the victors persuaded the North to revert to the traditional attitude of treating negroes as servants expected to know their place, thereby creating what is, in effect, a slave based economy. One consequence of this is that American liberals flee to Canada to live there as exiles, among them Emerson, Thoreau and Mark Twain. Only in Canada does a women’s movement thrive, but it’s also there that groups hostile to slavery debate whether their tactics should extend to terrorism. The “Cotton Curtain” between the C.S.A. and Canada reminds one of the Berlin wall and this is always a film in which seriousness is not far below the surface. Thus when John Kennedy comes into the picture he is neatly described as “a black sympathiser in favour of emancipation” but in addition mention is made of his violent death. Indeed the film’s blend of fact and fiction is such that one is not always certain where the boundary between the two lies. For example, there’s a quote at the start apposite to Willmott’s aim here about the need to make people laugh if you are going to get the truth across. It is credited to George Bernard Shaw but it could well be an invention: I just don’t know.

Two areas in particular yield great scope for this film’s sense of fun and parody. First there are the commercial breaks that at regular intervals interrupt the supposed TV programme. These are hilariously realised despite the fact that they simultaneously represent serious comment on issues of colour and the like. The other source of parody is the cinema itself since C.S.A. is full of take-offs in the form of extracts from films that don’t exist but so easily might have done. They range from D.W. Griffith’s silent classic The Hunt For Dishonest Abe by way of an unconvincing historical movie made by RKO in 1946 The Jefferson Davis Story (just listen to the music score for it as an example of spot-on parody) to a 1953 black and white melodrama: the latter echoing Hollywood’s cycle of anti-Communist films has here been adjusted to bear the title I Married An Abolitionist. These wonderfully realised bogus clips extend also to supposed newsreel and propaganda pieces and the more you know about films of these by-gone eras the greater the delight in these sequences. I might add that to bring us more up to date we are also given a scene from a musical play that sounds suspiciously like the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Among all the real people and events played around with in this way, the film also presents one completely fictional thread by inventing the Fauntroy family whose history is traced through many generations before reaching a dramatic conclusion. But the ultimate irony, the one at the very heart of Willmott’s concept, is the extent to which the film’s inventions about a totally different American history prove again and again to be uncomfortably close to things as they are. What is portrayed here reminds us of much about America today and that includes its overseas ambitions, its promotion of family values in a religious fundamentalist context and the fact that the degree of control at which the authorities seem to be aiming could be regarded as another kind of slavery. Individual viewers of this highly diverting and provocative film are invited to decide for themselves just how much truth exists within the film’s fantasy world.



“Poisonous hilarity… brilliant” – The Guardian Unlimited.

“A sharp mockumentary” – Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard.

“Satire of a passionately committed kind, clever, amusing, chilling even”
-Philip French, The Observer.

“Smart, angry, intellectually challenging, funny amd also deeply moral. I loved it.”
- t-rebeck as posted on IMdB website.

Programme notes by Mansel Stimpson.