Katherine is there with her two other African-American friends and colleagues. The nature of those limits is indicated in the very next scene, which cuts ahead to a lonely road in Virginia in 1961. She quickly displays her genius there-but the school’s narrow horizons suggests the sharply limited opportunities for black people over all. Its redress of the record begins in West Virginia in 1926, where the sixth-grade math prodigy Katherine Coleman is given a scholarship to a school that one of her teachers refers to as the only one in the region for black children that goes beyond the eighth grade. “Hidden Figures” is a subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history, that fills in the general outlines of these women’s roles in the space program. It depicts repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations’ achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements. “Hidden Figures” is a film of calm and bright rage at the way things were-an exemplary reproach to the very notion of political nostalgia. The efforts of black Virginians to cope with relentless ambient racism and, where possible, to point it out, resist it, overcome it, and even defeat it are the focus of the drama. Those segregationist rules and norms-and the personal attitudes and actions that sustained them-are unfolded with a clear, forceful, analytical, and unstinting specificity. The insults and indignities that black residents of Virginia, and black employees of NASA, unremittingly endured are integral to the drama. The movie is set mainly in 19, in Virginia, where a key NASA research center was (and is) based, and the movie is aptly and thoroughly derisive toward the discriminatory laws and practices that prevailed at the time. The basic virtue of “Hidden Figures” (which opens on December 25th), and it’s a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |