‘Cold Mountain’ isn’t directly related to slaves’ experience

Gayle Pollard-Terry’s article about the Civil War film “Cold Mountain” (“Film Inaccurate in Its Lack of Blacks, Online Campaign Says,” Feb. 4) leaves out some critical facts.

The film is largely about the women left behind and one man who refuses to continue to fight. What is key is that the main characters in the film and the fictional book it was based on come from a specific part of the South, namely the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, and were never intended to represent the entire Southern experience during the Civil War.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of African American studies at Harvard University, recently told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “Certainly we need more films about the African-American experience during the Civil War and about slavery in general, and I have to confess, it is ... difficult for me as an African American to sympathize with a Confederate soldier. However, it strikes me that ‘Cold Mountain’ is essentially a love story between two white people who live in a rural area where slavery was not a fundamental aspect of the economy. It’s a mistake to think that most white people in the South had slaves. They didn’t.”

And filmmaker John Singleton recently commented on the race question (as stated in a correction that ran in the Los Angeles Times Feb. 4), “That’s not what it was about. This was the first time in American history that a war film has had a protagonist that wasn’t a gung-ho hero. He was an AWOL guy.... Other people are clouding the issue of what the film was about.”

Gates suggests that this film may inspire other films related more directly to the experience of slavery. He states, “So while I understand the criticism, I think we should be directing our efforts toward having films made where slavery was more essential a part of that story.”