Selma opened in limited release on December 25, 2014 to rave reviews. Critics praised the film for its poignancy, its jarring use of violence, its inclusion of so many other movement leaders who had long since fallen out of the public eye, and its humanization of King. “Ms. DuVernay has stripped away layers of fond memory and retroactively imposed harmony to touch the raw, volatile political reality of the mid-1960s,” wrote A.O. Scott of the New York Times. “I have rarely seen a historical film that felt so populous and full of life, so alert to the tendrils of narrative that spread beyond the frame.”
In an interview with The Politic, Scott said Selma depicts less the history and more the feeling of the political and social turmoil of the mid-1960s. “Feature films are not history, feature films are historical fiction. That doesn’t mean they have a license to invent every event or misrepresent history, but it does mean that they do have great latitude. They’re telling fictional stories based on history,” he says. “In a case like this, it’s about capturing the mood, the feeling, and to some degree the meaning of what was happening.” For those like Scott, who argue that telling history is more than getting the facts straight, well-made historical films depict the mood of a time period more vividly than a textbook ever could; the scene of Cooper in a courthouse voter registration booth is one of the many ways that the film accomplishes this.
The stock, “white” narrative, as critical race theorists call it, is the go-to popular image of civil rights: it depicts President Johnson as the savior of a movement led only by King. Mark Harris of Grantland, writing much later than Scott and well after the firestorm of criticism about Selma’s treatment of history erupted, defended the film on these grounds: “This is the rare movie,” he wrote, “about civil rights told from the perspective of the oppressed rather than from that of their putative benefactors.” Yale African American Studies professor Crystal Feimster, seconds Harris. “This is about memory,” she said at Yale’s panel on the film. “The civil rights activists remember it [Selma] differently [than white politicians].” For many, the film exposes a perspective on civil rights that is normally excluded from public discourse.
For Feimster and others, Selma’s subjects and storyteller reclaim the memory of civil rights for a black audience. “Those of us who have been so excited about this movie in many ways have been plowing in other people’s fields, gleaning cotton from other people’s fields, and now we can finally have a little acre of our own. This is kind of a first in some ways,” said Feimster. The slavery metaphor is hard to miss.