PMA Chair and Associate Professor Samantha Noelle Sheppard has written a review for The Guardian about the documentary Natchez, called “Plantation weddings and pre-civil war fashion: the film that critiques the historical fantasy of Natchez.”
The film’s official website includes the following description: Natchez captures an unsettling clash between history and memory in a small Mississippi town; a layered mosaic of people contending with the weight of the past in a place where it is always present. Equal parts amusing and disturbing, we journey through an antebellum tourist destination at a crossroads as it grapples with a deeply troubled history that is so thoroughly ingrained in its present, we’re left to wonder if it’s actually past at all.
“Suzannah Herbert’s documentary Natchez,” writes Sheppard, “does not evade the Mississippi town’s contradictions. Instead, it actively adjudicates them, staging white people’s curated nostalgia against Black people’s historical knowledge, lived experience and institutional fact.
“The result is a revelation of how Natchez’s public life and economic survival remain tethered to a carefully managed historical fantasy. That fantasy, Herbert shows, is not simply local or touristic. It is cinematic. It is the plantation myth, endlessly recycled, aestheticized and monetized both on screen and in social life, as it refuses to account for the violence of slavery that made it possible.”
Read Sheppard’s full review in The Guardian: Plantation weddings and pre-civil war fashion: the film that critiques the historical fantasy of Natchez
Read more about the film.
