Burning is based on the true story of the killing of three young Civil Rights workers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner -two white and one black - in Mississippi in 1964 during the Civil Rights campaign in the South of the United
The film starts with the murder - one barely has time to get involved in the fate of the young men - and concentrates on the efforts of the FBI to track down and prosecute the
The two main characters are FBI men, one a northerner and one from Mississippi, where he had been a sheriff before going north to join the FBI. Making the FBI the heroes makes for an odd feeling, to say the least. knowing that the reality is that they fully back the racist system and indulge in all kinds of nefarious practices which damage civil rights.
That said, the film is interesting and worth seeing. It brings different things to different people. I went to see it with three other people, one of them black. For me, it brought hack the horror which I had felt at the time of the murders. Bad ar all the other violence and murders during the Civil Rights campaign had been, these seemed particularly horrific because of the way in which Lie voung men bad been set up and murder, hecause of the way in which it was not allowed that they be buned together in Mississippi and, most of all, hecause of the way in which Chancy, the black man, lad heen mutilated as well as killed.
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This last fact was not referred to in the film, nor were the names of the three victims given either, though the way white Southerers used to inflict castration on blacks was explored.
Perhaps the motivation for this was to make the episode seem more general, but I found it disturbing that the murdered men had no identity other than being called 'boys' or
"civil rights activists*
One of my friends, only a few years younger than myself, knew of the murders.
them, and for him the film had the effect of making events that he had heard about more real, even given the inevitable gloss given by the
The youngest of the party, in her late twenties, was not sure whether these particular murders were fichonal, extrapolated
From the general history of the period, or factual. She, along with about half the audience, was black, and had had some doubts about going to see the film - much along the same lines as women might have about going to see The Accused
- but, having seen it, felt that it had been worth the pain. The obviously moved - the silence war pulpable as we left the
The film was in the liberal tradition - clearly against racism and higotry, hut without any real analysis of their causes. The nearest it came to such an analysis was when the
Mississippian FBI man told his colicague a story about his
Father killing the mule of a neighbouring black farmer who was doing better than his father.
He ended the story by saying,
If he was no better than a m W Unlikely heroes: Hackman and Dafoe as FBi men The film shows the black community as simply passive Negro, he was nothing."
However, it does raise a number of interesting questions. The Northem FBI man clearly sces the Southemers as somehow weird and himself an coming South to solve the problems there. The black community is largely passive and frightened, though elements of resistance do come through -as, for example, in some of the church services, in the scene where the black farmer takes his gun out to try to fight off the Klan invaders and in the scene where the young black boy tells the FBI man to ask the sheriff his questions, and responds to the latter's question, 'Why aren't you frightened?' by saying. "Why aren't you?'
The attitude of while Southemers who are not Klan memhers is also raised, though not fully explored. For example, in one scene, the camera cuts straight from the beating up of a young black boy to a television interview with a woman in the crowd watching the dragging of the swamp for the bodies. She is asked how she thinks black people are treated in Mississippi and responds along the lines that they are generally treated well and it's only the Northem student rabble who have stirred up trouble. The tuming point in the film comes when the wife of the deputy sheriff gives the FBI the information which leads to their being able to set up and calch the criminals. When she is severely beaten up as a result of this, the feeling of the FBI men changes from one of professional determination to one of emotional involvement. For the audience, too, this scene leads to audible gasps. Do we still feel more about violence against a white person? Or was this because she was a woman? Or hecause of the realisation anyone, regardless of colour?
However, though the questions are raised, answers are not explored and the glossines of the treatment of the FBI is unrealistic and disturbing, in spite of these reservations, the film is worth making at effort to sce. Like Cry Freedom, it is a Jot better than might have been expected, though it in worse than one would have liked.