Cracker Crazy: Invisible Histories of the Sunshine State

It's quite a decent documentary, done by a Miami native and using an innovative format.

Mostly, what we see are images -- paintings from the old days, movies and newsreels for more modern times. But instead of the several narrators telling us what we're looking at and what the images mean, we see printed statements, often quotations, on the screen and we read them ourselves. This is all to the good inasmuch as none of the narrators has a particularly compelling voice. They sound like you and me reading from index cards.

It's an ambitious film, covering about 12,000 years of Florida's history. Well -- a certain kind of history, what the writers have called an "invisible history," one not often brought up for public scrutiny.

Georg Koszulinski's sympathies are all for the underdog, so we're exposed to the U. S. Army's war in the 1840s against the Seminole and Calusa tribes; then on to Flagler, the millionaire architect of the real estate boom, and his failed attempt to build an overseas railroad to Key West; then the Ku Kux Klan; then the illegal immigrants who have replaced the slaves in labor-intensive industries like tomato picking.

The way the writer/director deals with Flagler's railroad is emblematic of his approach. Many veterans of WWI were brought to the keys to build the bridges and lay the rails. A more than usually powerful hurricane in 1931 washed away much of the work and killed more than a hundred workers. The bodies were piled up, doused with oil, and set afire. Some of the bodies burst open while burning. The final printed statement we see asks: "Who murdered the workers?" President Roosevelt's explanation that it was an act of God is implicitly dismissed. The last few minutes include a glimpse of a sign telling "G. W. Bush" to stay off Native American land. The film ends with a picture of what the Miami will look like in the future -- under water because of global warming.

I didn't find the sociopolitical position offensive, although I disagreed sometimes with the writer's inferences. Unsavory topics need to be brought to our attention from time to time. For every pathography like this one, there are a dozen that are cheerfully optimistic, full of boilerplate, that ignore the underside of what's commonly accepted as "progress." The film is helped considerably by the musical score than dances along in the background as we read the statements. Usually these are period songs, sometimes old and scratchy. The songs often have folk origins. Doc Watson is an example.

The images I saw were fuzzy, but not enough to confuse us about what we're looking at. Nice job, overall.

Georg Koszulinski's documentary Cracker Crazy: Invisible Histories of the Sunshine State reminds us that beyond the history we read in text books there is often a hidden history, shrouded in myth. According to Koszulinski, "all histories are invisible but some are more invisible than others". Case in point, the history of Florida where the popular images of bathing beauties, sandy beaches, and tourist hotels hide an untold story of racism and exploitation. The film, culled from 850 images and 1,000 films in the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee, looks at Florida from the point of first European contact to the 2000 election. Employing both narration and extensive use of inter-titles, it depicts the struggle of the Calusa, the Seminoles, and the Creeks to hold onto their land against the many encroachments of Europeans and Americans.

Modern Floridian history began with the Spanish expedition of Ponce de Leon, the first white man to reach Florida in 1513. It was a time when 350,000 Indians inhabited the State. Ostensibly looking for the Fountain of Youth but more likely seeking gold to pad his country's coffers, Ponce de Leon brought cattle and 200 passengers when he returned after his initial visit but was killed by Colusa Indians who had heard stories that the goal of the white man was to enslave the brown man. Hernando de Soto soon followed and discovered the Mississippi River for the Europeans but also baptized natives in blood, massacring and mutilating them in the process.

Koszulinski details the trek of the 1000 Creek Indians who escaped into Florida and the killing of 800 of their warriors at the Battle of Horseshoe bend by Andrew Jackson, earning him the nickname of "Sharp Knife". The biggest segment is devoted to the Seminoles and the two wars they fought, the longest and costliest Indian conflicts in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson attacked a Seminole fort in 1816 because it harbored hundreds of runaway slaves, thus initiating the First Seminole War. The Second War, which lasted for seven years, was touched off by the Dade Massacre, the largest slave uprising in U.S. history in which 16 plantations were destroyed.

Fighting to overcome plantation owners who sought to recapture runaway slaves who lived among the Seminoles, the Indian warriors, led by Osceola, fought bravely but were eventually forced to give up 28 million acres of land in exchange for a reservation near Lake Okeechobee and most of the tribe was exiled to lands west of the Mississippi. Because of the inhospitable land on the reservation on which they were unable to grow crops, they often had to migrate beyond their boundaries to grow crops to eat. The boundaries, however, were strictly enforced by laws that allowed anyone to arrest an Indian found off the reservation.

The film then describes the failed efforts of Henry Flagler to build a railroad and an overseas highway to Key West, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and the slaughter at Rosewood in 1923 where 100 black residents were massacred by Klan members and the town destroyed because a white woman claimed she was assaulted by a black man. In addition, the film relates how the first hotel built in Miami, The Royal Palm, was constructed on top of an ancient Indian burial site whose remains were tossed into an open pit, and discusses the plight of Latino farm workers, mostly illegal aliens who are exploited with impunity.

Though the Spanish stronghold would be compromised by Great Britain and later the United States who acquired Florida in 1845 because slaveholders demanded it, massive Spanish influence remains, but the film is strangely silent about the influx of Cuban refugees in South Florida during the last twenty years. Cracker Crazy, however, is a fascinating documentary that is backed by an outstanding soundtrack of archival blues and folk songs from the Florida Folklore Collection and Archives. While the sequence of events is somewhat disjointed and jumps in time are confusing, it is still an important and very entertaining film. Cracker Crazy, scheduled for limited release in June 2007, tells it like it is, or like it was. "Like a specter whose death remains unavenged", Koszulinski says, "time passes, history becomes myth, and our lies and half-truths are forgotten". Cracker Crazy will not let us forget.

This is from a young filmmaker, whose previous projects I've seen. There are two. The first, "Blood of the Beast" was amazingly ambitious cinematically. The skills required to support the highly folded ambition weren't there, but I would much rather see something clever that fails (or partially succeeds) than something mundane and perfectly manufactured. His second project "Silent Voyeur" was cinematically ordinary with the risk in the narrative, with folding experiments similar to the visual ones of the prior project.

This is wholly different. The setup here is to start with mostly archival footage on Florida. These are films from the last 50 years or so created to tell tourists what Florida is, and at the same time tell Floridians what legacy they inherit — nearly all inhabitants being migrants. Naturally, these begin with bathing beauties — oddly always in some formation suggesting plentitude of purchasable pulchritude. Glossed over this is standard historical tripe: a happy story of why things became how they are.

What KoszulinskI does is take this "visible" cinematic image and report on the "invisible" history underneath. And its a very shameful set of events that when you string them together define Florida as something so damaged in its being that it is doomed to a schizophrenic existence that will produce manic results. We start with native Americans and proceed through deliberate injustices, then to vets and the environment, all couched in lies. The gimmick is that we SEE the lies in these archival movies.

Its a good idea. Its done well enough to matter, especially the anchor in the recent stolen US presidential election. Its perhaps a bit too long. There's one cinematic blot, a recreated image of a Spaniard arriving and "seeing" the land. It looks comic and could have been part of the fold, what he sees and we now do.

I know a fair amount of Indian history and a few small details were wrong so far as some images used. But that's niggling.

Two major historical segments are mishandled.

One concerns Disney. There are tons and tons of things that could have been said of Disney the man, his empire there in Florida, and general corporate thuggishness. There's similarly a ton of things to be said about how the sweet notion of a world Walt created in his movies are a major contributor to how we can take messy guilt and "retell" it to seem rosy. He helped define cinematic rosiness. So there's a world of opportunity here. Instead Koszulinski picks the thinnest of excuses: Walt saw Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi filmmaker, when she came to Hollywood and "Snow White" was allowed on Hitler's movie screens when it was the most popular movie in the world.

What a shame to have missed this, and undermined all else with this slight excuse.

The other problem is an omission made obvious by the intrusion of the filmmaker in the film. Toward the end, he mentions that he grew up there and that his mother was terrific. It underscores the omitted situation today. Florida is a essentially a Hispanic world with some retirees parked in large groups. Its Cuban, a whole culture that defines itself in terms of myth, a myth that is seldom examined. Its obvious that in this one instance, the filmmaker himself has a stake in keeping at least some history hidden.

Makes it a bit more interesting and persuasive.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I got a chance to see 'Cracker Crazy' a little while ago. Wow! The concept of turning state histories upside down is wonderful, and should be repeated many times over. How wonderful would it be if every state had one? A bruising metaphor for all the slime, corruption, and overall negligent behavior that just gets swept under the rug by the powers that be, so that the sun can beat down even harder, Florida is the perfect place to start.

Director Georg Koszulinski creates a tempting pastiche of footage old and new, layered with languorous music that nearly turn this documentary into the equivalent of a postcard. The information presented, though, paints a different story. (Who ever knew that Walt Disney was a Nazi-lover?)

Aesthetically pleasing in its own subversive way, 'Cracker Cracker' also manages to cram in some rather slighting information. While at some points this can mean a lot of text, the history is there - often ugly, a bit jading, and damn unsettling, but something you can nonetheless hum along to.

Florida. State of sunshine, beaches, beautiful women, fun and leisure. That is what we "know" but director Georg Koszulinski goes beyond this superficial appearance and looks at the formative events that led us to the present day. Covering the Seminoles, the Indian war, the Ku Klux Klan and, of course, Walt Disney, the invisible history is revealed.

It probably would have helped to have more of an appreciation of what Florida is today beyond the very basic setting the film builds at the start but despite this I found this film accessible from the start and it did hold my interest for the duration. With mostly impressive sourcing and use of archive footage, Koszulinski delivers an engaging history of Florida from centuries ago up till very recent events. At times he uses humour but mostly his approach is straight delivery of the history albeit with a sense of mischief across the whole film. At times this mischief really works and this is best seen in the contrast with the "truth" over historical footage such as the section that deals with the sugar can workers. However at other times it does it in a very clumsy way and seems too keen to be getting to points (attacks?) that it really has no need to be making.

The unnecessary attack on Disney is one example of this – it is a weak point and doesn't really fit in with the wider themes that the film explores, just coming off like a quick dig rather than part of a bigger argument. Likewise linking the Klan's control of blacks to the disenfranchisement of votes in the Florida 2000 election seems a jump too far and seems motivated by the director's politics rather than something genuinely coming out of the film (and I speak as someone who holds quite liberal views and views that election as a low in modern western democracy). It didn't need to do this either because the subject does build and connect well to today in the way it moves into the issue of modern workers and the conditions they live and work in. Koszulinski also seems to underestimate his audience's ability to make their own mind up about the nature of Florida's history and I did sense he was pushing too much towards making us "shocked" or outraged by the truth – maybe he just didn't trust the material to be enough in this jaded age? The film's structure is a good try but it is not as tight and clear as it needed to be. The credits reveal definite "chapters" in the film but these were not that clear to me at the time. The structure of the film itself is predetermined by the natural use of time as the direction but this flows without that many clear breaks or steps. In fairness, it is clear at some points but not that often and I did feel that I would have benefited from some clear division of the film into clearer chapters by the use of headings for example. A secondary issue I had was the way that the does sometimes feel like a polemic rather than an unbiased documentary. The aforementioned quick digs are part of this but the way that the film is based on narration rather than the use of expert contributions also makes it feel like it is all coming from one point of view. This wasn't a major problem for me but the style did leave it on a fine line so that it was too easily nudged over at times.

The sound quality was poor at times but I accepted this as part of the budget and the nature of some of the footage but the "thanks mom" moment towards the end was a step away from professionalism that it didn't need to put on itself. If I sound overly critical then I'm sorry because I did actually enjoy the film for the central aims it had, because these were mostly achieved and were done in a way that made the film engaging even to myself – someone with no real knowledge (or interest!) in Florida. There is plenty of scope for improvement of course, but this is still an interesting and informative account of a silent history.