C.S.A., THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

US, 2004, 89 minutes, Colour.
Greg Kirsch, Renee Patrick.
Directed by Kevin Wilmott.

Set in an contemporary alternative world where the Confederate States of America managed to win the American Civil War, a British film documentary examines the history of this nation. Beginning with its conquest of the northern states, the film covers the history of this state where racial enslavement became triumphant and the nation carried sinister designs of conquest. Interspersed throughout are various TV commercials of products of a virulent racist nature as well as public service announcements promoting this tyranny. Only at the end do you learn that there is less wholly imagined material in the film than you might suspect. (IMDb synopsis)

Here is an arrestingly offbeat film. Ken Burns, the celebrated American historian and film-maker, produced a powerful television series on the Civil War. Kevin Wilmott, a writer and Kansas University lecturer, had the bright idea of spoofing the television documentary format and providing an alternate history of the Civil War and subsequent American history. What if… the South had won, if slavery was re-instituted… and that Hitler won World War 2 and…?

So, that is the kind of parody this film is. It purports to be the first screening of a documentary, claimed to be British from the BBS!, on an American channel despite previously being banned. Part of the comedy of the film is that every eight minutes or so, commercials are screened which are blatantly racist. The final credits then reveal that all the products in the spoof commercials actually did exist, some until the 1970s.

Obviously, the humour is sometimes broad, at other times subtle. It will depend on one’s historical knowledge and perspective as to how funny some of the situations are. There is much which attacks what actually did happen in the US by portraying a Southern-led US (with Lincoln fleeing to Canada as a war criminal and campaigning against the CSA) and tracing the family history of a dynasty which was involved in slavery and all kinds of subversive activity (from our point of view). Just when the audience is needing time to think about what all this satire is getting at, the commercials turn up to give us a breather.

Much satire is an acquired taste. And some senses of humour are so straightforward that they do not permit much irony and tend to take irony literally. Since all of CSA is ironic, it obviously limits its appeal to those who really enjoy an off-kilter slant in their spoofs and parodies. And they will like it a lot.