{"id":3466,"date":"2022-06-12T12:21:10","date_gmt":"2022-06-12T20:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3466"},"modified":"2022-06-20T11:07:46","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T19:07:46","slug":"watching-cabin-in-the-sky-for-lent-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=3466","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Movies Retrospective: Watching “Cabin in the Sky” for Lent (2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Reposting this essay I wrote twelve years ago about Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 classic all-Black musical because a.) people\u00a0besides me like it a whole lot and b.) because of its more-timely-than-ever admonitions against too-easy dismissals of what is believed to be Anachronistic and (thus) Patronizing. Also if you’ve never seen it before and it happens to come your way again, jump on it. You\u00a0won’t be sorry.<\/i><\/p>\r\n

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At the hinge of the 1960s and 1970s, Cabin in the Sky<\/em> embodied everything we young, gifted, and solemn black college students thought we were fighting against. All we blinkered baby cultural-nationalists could see back then in those idyllic depictions of small-town African American folk life were unhealthy levels of honeysuckle and hambone. Eighty-six those rolling dice and eyeballs, all that cornball piety and undignified shucking! Is that really what we wanted our collective profile to look like after King and Malcolm and countless others had died for our advancement?<\/p>\r\n

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It\u2019s a measure of how much time has passed that I can\u2019t even LOOK at that previous sentence, much less write it, without wincing; the same kind of wincing we aforementioned Children of the Movement were doing whenever Cabin\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0poked out from TV\u2019s wee-hour wilds or was screened at collegiate film societies. Exaggerated nose-turning-in-a-vertical-direction is at least as embarrassing as pronounced eye-rolling \u2013 and not nearly as funny. Given the choice between retroactive scoldings from what some new-jack pundits have come to label the \u201csoul patrol\u201d and the to-be-or-not-to-be anxieties displayed by Eddie \u201cRochester\u201d Anderson, I know whose party I\u2019d rather go to.<\/p>\r\n

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