The Burning Cross
East Coast Premiere of New Restoration!
Post-film Q&A with Brandeis University Professor Thomas Doherty, Author Hollywood & Hitler and the new book How Film Became History.
One of the boldest American films of the postwar period to tackle homegrown fascism, The Burning Cross was the first anti-Klan film to explicitly depict Black Americans as victims of KKK terror on screen. This little know and rarely screened thriller was banned by censor boards in Virginia and Detroit upon its release in 1947. Johnny Larimer (Henry Daniels Jr) is a newly discharged WWII veteran unable to re-adjust to life in his small hometown, when he falls in with a local white supremacist group called the “American Only Association.”
The film’s depiction of how racist rhetoric culminates in violence, and how voter suppression, corporate grift, and political corruption quickly metastasize to supplant democratic rule and law and order is clear-eyed and squarely on point. As groundbreaking as the film was, it was not without compromise. An on-screen prologue from the original production, returned to the film in this new restoration, suggests that the Klan was founded by “men of good intentions” who were betrayed by a corrupt, greedy few.
The Burning Cross was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by The Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
NCJF wishes to highlight an excerpt from program notes published by our colleagues at the UCLA Film & Television Archive which accompanied their recent series of anti-fascism films:
“The essential mission of any archive is to serve as a counterforce to [sic] historical forgetting, to preserve the material artifacts of the past to ensure a continuity of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. In his pamphlet On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), historian Timothy Snyder argues that as the ‘distant traumas’ of fascism, Nazism and communism faded from generational memory, Americans began to believe that ‘history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.’ [These films] reflect the urgency of the moment when fascism posed an existential threat to American democracy… [and] stand as stark reminders of what was at stake then and the urgent need to resist.” –Paul Morrison, UCLA Film & Television Archive, From John Doe to Lonesome Rhodes: Anti-fascism From the Archive
Please note: by purchasing a ticket to this screening, you agree that your contact information will be shared with the National Center for Jewish Film for the purpose of including you on their mailing lists.
