Joshua Rolle
Mr. Raleigh
Film Genres
September 8th, 2015
Edward Zwick's Use of the Racial Emotional Trigger ''Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.''-Edward Zwick. Edward Zwick is an academy award winning director who has spent his career cross-pollenating different situations and genres into a cohesive story that is able to move the audience to a plethora of different emotions as evident in his films: Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond; during these movies, Zwick uses the underlining tones of racism
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The civil war movie, that glorified the first unit of the United States Colored Troops and their heroic actions at Fort Wagner, resulted in Zwick receiving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director; which at the time was unprecedented as Glory was only Edward Zwick's second feature film. One critic, named James Berardinelli even went so far as to write, ''For a motion picture made on a relatively modest budget, Glory looks great. From a technical standpoint, the movie is a masterpiece, and the verisimilitude of the battle scenes is not in question.''. Another critic, Leonard Maltin, wrote that the film was "Grand, moving, breathtakingly filmed and faultlessly performed", while giving Zwick's Glory a four star rating. Zwick's next war film, The Last Samurai, would go on to be nominated for four Academy Awards while Zwick himself won Best Director from the National Board of Review. The Last Samurai, which portrays the tale of a formerly retired American officer who helped westernize the Japanese army, was similar in many aspects to Glory as both films dealt with the concept of discrimination as seen through the eyes of the oppressor race and is done in such a way that the audience is left with an air of liberal historical guilt. Zwick once again uses this underlining subtext to reach the