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  3. Hollywood Forsakes History for EventsA)Oprah Winfrey calls

Hollywood Forsakes History for EventsA)Oprah Winfrey calls

游客2023-07-05  32
问题                     Hollywood Forsakes History for Events
A)Oprah Winfrey calls Beloved the black equivalent of Schindler’s List. To be sure, every ethnic group has a right, and perhaps even a duty, to protect its painful history onto the silver screen. If white southerners of generations past were entitled to Birth of Nation and Gone with the Wind,then surely the black experience in the South can be told in film, too, from Cabin in the Sky to Rosewood.
B)Once upon a time,Hollywood recreated history with regularity;wizened character actor George Arliss made a career in anachronistic costume,playing everyone from Benjamin Disraeli to Cardinal Richelieu to Baron Rothschild. But,today, studio-nomics cuts against routinized Hollywood historicism. So instead filmgoers get "event" histories,from Titanic to Saving Private Ryan. The blitz for Beloved,which opened Friday, includes Oprah on a dozen magazine covers.
C)The tagline of the film, "The past has a life of its own," is a southern Gothicism that echoes the grand master of that genre, William Faulkner, who famously observed, "The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past."
D)Beloved is based on the true story of a black woman who tried to kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. And while the film, drawn from Toni Morrison’s novel, strives toward what the historian Thomas Carlyle called "the inner fact of things," its magical-realist Anne Riceish dimension undercuts its moral impact.
E)But the bigger problem Beloved will face is its emphasis on victimization. And, while every tragedy is worth telling, perhaps, if the tale is tragic and only that, its audience will be limited. Indeed, sometimes bleak sadness is crowded out by even bleaker sadness, leaving some genocides little noted, as in Armenia and, today, Rwanda.
F)Closer to home, the recent murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Laramie, Who, reminds us that new tragedies are always in the making.
G)If brutality is the norm in human history, then what’s most dramatically compelling are chronicles of men and women who rise above the iniquity around them. That explains why the 1989 movie Glory, in which Denzel Washington won an Oscar for his portrayal of black soldier fighting for Union and Emancipation in the Civil War, has achieved such resonance.
H)Of course, one might conclude from the movie that Morrison’s real target is not so much slavery as it is masculinity. The men in the film, black and white, are either irrelevant or irredeemably evil, so infamous that they would suck the milk out of a woman’ s breasts to deprive her children of sustenance. When a male character tells Winfrey, "I never mistreated a woman in my life," she snaps back: "Well, that makes[one]of you."
I)As a group, women deserve their place in the cinematic sun, but the unmistakable message of Beloved—and for that matter, Morrison’s other work—is not the promise of harmony, but rather the persistence, even the permanence, of male-female inequality. And so Beloved may not be a work of historical memory at all, but rather yet another salvo in the continuing culture war that rages today. [br] If a story is nothing noteworthy but a tragedy, there will not be too many audiences.
选项
答案 E
解析 题干：如果一个故事仅是一部悲剧，再没有其他值得注意的东西，那么观众不会太多。题干关键词是noteworthy，tragedy和audiences。文中E段第二句提到，虽然，每个悲剧可能都是值得讲述的，但是，如果它只有悲剧情节，它的观众则是有限的。与题干意思一致，故选E。
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