Sud (South). 1999. Belgium/France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. 70 min.
South could not be more timely. The murder of James Byrd Jr., dragged to his death by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998, impelled Chantal Akerman to make this enduring meditation on racial hatred and the idea that “race is nation, and nation is race” in a film entitled, simply and tellingly, South. “The road to arriving at the idea for this film was long and winding: From a response to Gummo (on the way to becoming a cult film), to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and then to James Baldwin’s Harlem Quartet, also the one that finally made me realize that this film, like D’Est, would once again revolve around what continues to obsess me: History, both great and small, fear, mass graves, hatred of others, of oneself, and also the dazzling beauty…. Yes, I want to go there and see at what cost the American miracle is happening, on whose backs the greatest accumulation of wealth ever seen is being created, and if this landscape retains the traces or even the memory of anything of these lynchings, and if these trees still say something other than their own beauty…. It’s in Harlem Quartet, when the characters go for a tour of the South in the late 1950s, it was very dangerous. The way he described this silence evoked other things for me, another silence, the one my mother had once told me about in her kitchen. A certain silence of the camps and the fear it produces. It brought me back to the camps again. In a way, the South was a big camp for Black people. This silence recorded by my camera in the South has many possible evocations for me and for other viewers.” In one of the most chilling denouements in cinema history, Akerman revisits the scene of the crime: a seemingly innocent tracking shot retracing the road on which Byrd, chained to a pickup truck and decapitated by a culver pipe, met his senseless and brutal death.