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The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith Essay

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However that's one of the things that makes the movie fascinating. Too many movies about race are established in the past but contain the attitudes of the present. For example, Muhammad Ali as a slave in “Freedom Road” need say nothing that Muhammad Ali as a TV star in 1979 did not feel like saying. And so we get contemporary pie-ties about the past, and they do great damage because they hide the past itself from us. “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” re-creates its other time so well that we come out of the theater in substantial identification with its hero. We do not condone him, but we understand him. Jimmie Blacksmith in this movie kills a large number of innocent white people, including women and children. But he does not do so for reasons of the radical politics of hate. He does so, basically, because racism has driven him mad without even giving him the vocabulary he needs to be able to say that it is racism. Jimmie is a young man of mixed white and aboriginal blood, born of an Aborigine mother and a white father who took his sexual convenience in the nearby Aborigine settlement. Jimmie is raised by a white Christian family, who advise him to marry a white girl from a nearby farm "because then your children will be only a quarter black, and your grandchildren hardly black at …show more content…

Eventually (as it had happened in Australia in the factual case of Jimmy Governor at the break of the twentieth century), all the mockery, ill-treatment and exploitation that Jimmie experienced turned back at its inciters (Healy 247). He discovers that he will never be at home in either the white or black

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