Coluna Claquete – February 6, 2017 – Movie of the Week: “Hidden Figures”
Newton Ramalho
colunaclaquete@gmail.com – www.colunaclaquete.blogspot.com– @colunaclaquete
Movie of the Week: “Hidden Figures”
It is an unfortunate coincidence that the premiere of the film “Hidden Figures” (2016), an account of the United States races segregation time, coincides with a return of the world to a sea of intolerance that seems to defy any rational explanation.
In the period following the Second World War, the world was divided between a group of countries aligned with the United States, and another led by the Soviet Union. This state of constant tension was called the Cold War, and although there were some moments of real danger, there was never a direct confrontation between the two powers.
The dispute, however, happened in several other fields, with the main purpose to win the propaganda war.One of the areas where it happened the fierce dispute was the space race. The two blocks were amassing fortunes with fledgling technologies to achieve the laurels of a feat to take the man into space.
For some time the Russians took advantage, putting into space the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, the first living being, the dog Laika, and later the first man on a suborbital flight, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
These achievements left in turmoil Americans, who ran after the injury. The United States had other problems being evident, the most serious the racial segregation.
It is really strange that the country that was called the bulwark of democracy internally maintained a policy where racism was formalized in laws prohibiting even interracial marriages. Everything was absolutely separated, libraries, bathrooms, drinking fountains, seats in buses, houses, etc ..
Segregation also happened at work. In 1961, NASA, the newly created US space agency, was a faithful portrait of the rest of the country, with distinct offices, dining areas and bathrooms for blacks and whites.
In the administrative center of NASA in Langley, among thousands of other employees, worked friends Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe).The three women were hired as computers, professionals who did the tedious calculations behind any engineering design, using only mechanical calculators and their own knowledge.
Each one stood out in an area. Katherine, who since childhood surprised teachers with the ease that dominated mathematics, was a brilliant mathematician. Dorothy ran the whole group of black computers women without being recognized his leadership work. Mary, in turn, had great facility for practical engineering issues, though she never managed to enter the university.
Katherine had the opportunity to show their talents when she was called to work for the team led by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), which calculated the launch and re-entry trajectory of rockets, one of the delicate points of the space program, which had been the reason for many failures of experiments.
In addition to technical difficulties and lack of support from colleagues, Katherine still had to deal with the security classification that prevented her from having the basic data for the calculations. Items such as mass, speed, launch sites and rescue, all this was considered secret, and denied from his eyes.
Dorothy had its own problems, since the arrival of a brand new IBM computer threatened the jobs of computers women, as it would in seconds made calculations that they all would take days to complete. However, not even the technicians could do the machine work, and Dorothy, realizing that the future layed in that strange machine, sought to empower themselves on their own.
Mary, in turn, wanted at all costs to become an engineer at NASA. However, for this she needed to go the university, which only accepted white people. To overcome this, she had to go to court, to claim a feature considered impossible at the time.
The film shows, in a romantic way, as the effort to achieve a common goal brings people together and overcome differences. However, the recognition of these women, who had to win the double prejudice of race and gender, it would take decades to be done.“Hidden Figures” seeks to show not only the huge effort made to bring man into space with incipient technologies and high risk for astronauts, as well as the cruel face of segregation, something regarded as perfectly normal for white people.
The film is technically very well done, with good performances, especially Taraji P. Henson, great recreation of the time, and an engaging soundtrack. Some poetic liberties happens, like the utilization of Fortran language to run the computer.In fact, the operation was done in machine language, as Fortran was a high levell user interface.The site imdb.com lists dozens of factual errors and continuity, most linked to cars, but they do not interfere with the good understanding of the story.
“Hidden Figures” is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Adapted Screenplay.The film won the cast extraordinary performance award at SAG Awards, the Sindicate of Actors of Hollywood.
We hope that when seeing bad things of the past people come to their senses and realize that intolerance is the worst of ways for humanity, and that the closure of borders and building of walls will never help a man to get anywhere, either in space or good relationship with the other.
Original title: “Hidden Figures”