Film, Blacks in American

By: Thomas Cripps

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Film, Blacks in American

Historical overview of black filmmaking and the portrayal of blacks in American films.

The thread of African American history is spun from two sources: the struggle to define a place in the wider American life and the effort to maintain an authentic black presence in American culture. This duality is important in the realm of filmmaking because the film and camera of cinema cost more than the paper and pencil of writers. The cost of making movies affects—indeed threatens—the black presence on the screen.

The costly collaborative nature of filmmaking has blurred the definition of a “black” movie. Is it black if it is merely aimed at black viewers, or must it be made by blacks, or both? Critics disagree, although a few traits of black films seem characteristic. They might be either pastoral, speaking nostalgically about a rural past, such as Spencer Williams's pious The Blood of Jesus (1940), or hip and urbane, in the jive idiom of their time, such as Oscar Micheaux's Swing (1938) or Bessie Smith's St. Louis Blues (1929). Some black movies have carried messages, such as the Colored Players' The Scar of Shame (1927), in which an old lecher mourns the heroine whose passing reminds him that “our people have much to learn.” Others have celebrated small victories, such as Michael Roemer's Nothing but a Man (1963), with a lead actor who will fix flat tires for a living but knows that he will never take on the stereotypical role of “picking other people's cotton.” This theme is echoed in Ivan Dixon's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), in which a cabal of black heroes joyously mounts an all-but-hopeless black insurrection.

Often a black movie provides an anatomy of black cultural life, a glossary of style, patois, and politics, as in Michael Shultz's Car Wash (1976). Sometimes a so-called crossover movie finds an audience on both sides of the racial divide by drawing on a black cultural trait that speaks to black and white audiences. King Vidor's Hallelujah! (1929), for example, used the metaphor of a railroad train going to hell much as Eloyse Gist, the black evangelist, had done in her own Hell Bound Train, each conveying the same sense of pious urgency entwined with an almost erotic sensibility. In much the same way, Spike Lee, in Do the Right Thing (1989), drew a crossover audience into a dramatic debate over what, indeed, the right political thing was. Sometimes a black-angled movie succeeds as a crossover because it successfully mingles cultures. For example, Marcel Camus's Orfeo Negro (1959) retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice amid the annual Afro-Brazilian Carnival celebration. Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973) stars reggae singer Jimmy Cliff as a victim of a sleazy recording-industry boss. Driven to outlawry, Cliff adopts a fantasy life of revenge in the mode of an American cowboy (not unlike Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver). And in almost any Paul Robeson or Josephine Baker film of the 1930s, the theme involves a poignant outreach across racial cultures.

In any case, African American movies, whether so-called race movies made for black audiences or crossovers for a wider reach, arise from what historian Gerald Mast called “the particular cultural conditions” of black life and history that surely “influence, if not dictate” the imagery and voice of black film. The black critic James Snead has argued that a black cinema must “coin unconventional associations for black skin within the reigning film language” to replace well-known stereotypical images.

Era of Silent Films

African American images first appeared on the screen in 1898, a few years after the first theatrical projection of moving images. At first benign in their effect, the first films showed black soldiers embarking for the Spanish-American War of 1898 and West Indians at their daily tasks. In 1903, a fourteen-minute film of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared. After that time, as the technical art of editing for narrative effect improved, black figures fell more in line with the racial stereotypes of the day, appearing as chicken thieves, dishonest preachers, and the like. Only rarely did they turn up in even slightly authentic roles, as in The Fights of Nations (1907), which at least depicted black culture, although in a warped form. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War approached in 1910, white nostalgia for the war inspired maudlin tales of fraternity. Black slaves, once the focus of the combat, were reduced to sentimental figures who often sided with their Southern masters against their Northern liberators. The most renowned and artistically most compelling film of this genre was D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).

The first steps toward a specifically black cinema arose out of these expressions of white chauvinism. Bill Foster, an African American whose work has been lost, made such films as The Railroad Porter (1912), probably a light comedy, about a job in which many blacks were employed. The Birth of a Race (1918), two years in the making and perhaps three hours in length, began as a response to Griffith's film. But its succession of producers and backers, including Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee circle, Universal Pictures, and Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, lost touch with the original concept. Nonetheless, the film inspired George P. Johnson and his brother, Noble, to found the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to carry forward the quest for a black cinema, only to fail because of a nationwide influenza epidemic that closed theaters.

Shortly before World War I (1914–1918), the American movie industry gradually moved to California—to Hollywood. The so-called Jazz Age that followed offered little new to African Americans. Only a handful of movies offered blacks parts with any authenticity. These included the grizzled hobo in Jim Tully's tale of the lowly, Beggars of Life (1928); the seaman boldly played by boxer George Godfrey in James Cruze's Old Ironsides (1926); the faithful renderings of blacks in Showboat (1927) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927); and those in early sound films such as Dudley Murphy's St. Louis Blues (1929). However, blacks generally played conventional roles as chorus girls, convicts, racetrack grooms, boxing trainers, and smart-talking servants.

The sameness of these images surely led to the first boom of so-called race movies that were made by both black and white producers specifically for black audiences. George and Noble Johnson made as many as four films that were black versions of already defined Hollywood genres—success stories, adventures, and the like—but all of these movies have since been lost. In Philadelphia the Colored Players produced a body of films, most of which survived in the late 1990s, that included a Paul Laurence Dunbar story, a black version of Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), and their masterpiece, The Scar of Shame (1927), a melodrama about caste and class in black circles.

Oscar Micheaux was the dominant African American filmmaker of the era. A former Pullman porter and member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, homesteader, and novelist who sold his books door to door, Micheaux was also a legendary film entrepreneur who both broke with and built on Hollywood genres. More than any other known figure, Micheaux took up themes that Hollywood left untouched: Lynching, black success myths, and color-based caste. For years the only available example of his work was Body and Soul (1924), starring the black athlete, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. Recently, however, other Micheaux films have been rediscovered, including Within Our Gates (1920) and The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921). These have allowed fuller study of his work.

Sound Film in the Jazz Age

The coming of sound film at the start of the Great Depression momentarily daunted black filmmakers. On one hand, Hollywood for the first time could exploit black musical traditions, but on the other, makers of race movies lacked the capital to invest in making sound films or wiring old ghetto theaters for sound. White filmmakers, though, used sound with unaccustomed boldness. Al Jolson's “talkie” The Jazz Singer (1927) linked the oppression of blacks with that of white immigrants. Several short films attained equal social meaning, among them The St. Louis Blues (1929); Duke Ellington's The Black and Tan Fantasy (1930) and his allegorical Symphony in Black (1934); and Jimmy Mordecai's fable of the black migration from Southern farms to Northern cities, Yamacraw. MGM's Hallelujah! (1929) and Fox's Hearts in Dixie (1929) also focused on the tensions of this migration and devoted rare attention to the details of black life. Dudley Murphy's film version of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones was graced with a charming prologue by the black activist and poet James Weldon Johnson. This film closed the brief era of socially engaged films by bringing Paul Robeson to the screen in the title role. Taken together, these films hinted at the “unconventional associations” that critic Snead called for.

All to soon, though, corporate Hollywood returned to its profit-driven caution. Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical drama of 1929, The Green Pastures, for example, took half a decade to reach the screen and did so in shortened form. After that, black Americans, as usual, waited for small favors, such as Robeson's “Joe” in a 1936 remake of Showboat, Clarence Muse's rebellious slave in So Red the Rose (1935), Clarence Brook's Haitian doctor in John Ford's Arrowsmith (1931), and years of Hattie McDaniel playing flip servants, from Alice Adams (1933) to Gone With the Wind (1939). Nods at the reality of black life included John M. Stahl's 1934 social drama based on Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst's novel about the practice known as passing (for white), and a sprinkling of black workers and poor people in films that showed the outcasts of depression-ridden America.

Hattie McDaniel (right) won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammy in David O. Selznick's 1939 blockbuster film Gone With the Wind.

Culver Pictures

view larger image

Once again, makers of so-called race movies strained to fill the void, with black producers competing with whites. Micheaux recovered from bankruptcy, remade his autobiography as The Exile (1931), broke into talkies with The Girl from Chicago (1932) and Swing (1938), and survived the depression. George Randol, who acted on Broadway, joined him, as did William Alexander, who would make black newsreels during World War II, and other blacks. In Texas, Alfred Sack and Spencer Williams turned out the evocative The Blood of Jesus (1940), while Muse joined with B-moviemaker Harry Fraser to film a biography of the boxer Henry Armstrong, played poignantly by himself.

Comic actor Eddie Anderson poses for a publicity shot for the film Man About Town, in which he appeared with Jack Benny and Dorothy Lamour.

The Everett Collection

view larger image

Perhaps because they were the work of both black and white producers, the so-called race movies of the time blended Hollywood styles, such as gangster movies, westerns, and musicals, with black concerns. At the height of this movement, from 1937 to 1940, gangster movies linked poverty with the incidence of crime and included celebrations of black aspiration. In Ralph Cooper's Am I Guilty (1940), for example, a black physician had to choose between patching up a crook or ministering to the sick, a version of similar dilemmas in other films of the genre. Some, like Bert and Jack Goldberg's Paradise in Harlem (1940), focused on the communal spirit of Harlem, New York, in this case revealed in a jazz version of Othello mounted as a fund-raiser to fight urban crime. Similar themes appeared in a 1939–1940 cycle of all-black westerns and a series of Louis Jordan musicals, including one, Beware (1946), in which he saves a black college from closure.

War Years and Their Aftermath

With the onset of World War II, at a moment when American propaganda embraced brotherhood, tolerance, and equality as war aims, makers of race movies slipped from view—victims of a shortage of raw film stock. Yet black activists and their government together pressed filmmakers to address wartime racial injustice. The black railway porter's union, led by A. Philip Randolph, threatened a march on Washington unless the government granted equality of opportunity in the war industry; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held its annual convention in Los Angeles, partly to lobby Hollywood directly for better roles; and the black Pittsburgh Courier campaigned on its front pages for a “Double V”: a simultaneous victory over foreign fascism and domestic racism.

Federal agencies responded by making several movies with anti-racist messages. First among them in quality and breadth of distribution to both army and civilian theaters was the United States War Department's The Negro Soldier (1944), written by Carlton Moss, who also starred in the film. Late in the war, the government commissioned or inspired short civilian films on the theme of equitable race relations, among them Don't Be a Sucker, It Happened in Springfield, and The House I Live In (which won an Oscar in 1947 as the best short film). The movie studios joined the ranks—partly at the urging of the U.S. Office of War Information—and made racially integrated films about the military years before the armed forces would actually be integrated. Among war films with an integrated cast were MGM's Bataan (1943), Twentieth Century Fox's Crash Dive (1943), and Columbia's Sahara (1943). Movies set in civilian life, among them Since You Went Away (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1943), made similar gestures.

Documentaries strove for a similar liberal voice. Gjon Mili's 1944 Jammin' the Blues (a Life magazine “movie of the week”) so evoked the mood of a black jazz club that seasoned newspaper reporters thought it had been done with a hidden camera. Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt's The Quiet One (1949) caught the dedication that social workers gave to the plight of black juveniles. And the United Auto Workers sponsored an animated cartoon, The Brotherhood of Man (1947), that took up the fate of racism in postwar America.

Morgan Freeman received an Oscar nomination in 1994 for his role in The Shawshank Redemption.

Getty Images

view larger image

In the spring of 1949, at least three movies addressed racial issues: MGM's movie version of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust made racism an issue of conscience rather than politics; Louis DeRochemont's Lost Boundaries came from a Reader's Digest report on passing for white in a Vermont village; and, boldly for the times, Darryl Zanuck asked Jane White, daughter of Walter White of the NAACP, to do an uncredited but sweeping job of script doctoring on Pinky, yet another story of passing.

In the twenty years following Sidney Poitier's 1950 debut in Zanuck's No Way Out—two decades that could be dubbed “the age of Sidney Poitier”—scores of films emerged from Hollywood, each with an obligatory scene, sequence, or subplot involving a small, often painfully obvious victory over racism. Indeed, Poitier won an Oscar for his Christ-like savior of a group of nuns in Lilies of the Field (1963) and starred in the culmination of the genre, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1968). As if warning of the ominous price to pay for not following the liberal path to racial harmony, Harry Belafonte's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) closed with a scene in which two prejudiced bank robbers, one black and one white, blow themselves to bits rather than team up to pull off a job. By the 1950s, such movies played a sort of backbeat to the Civil Rights Movement.

Civil Rights and Blaxploitation

During the 1960s, with the full flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, films with racial content began to take on a harsher, more politically demanding edge. At first from abroad, later from sources outside the major studios, they challenged the simplistic optimism of Poitier's heyday. Costa-Gavras's The Battle of Algiers (1966) seemed to some black militants a textbook for direct action, while Amiri Baraka called the movie version of his short play Dutchman (1967) a “revolutionary revelation.” Even the Hollywood movies hardened: Robert Mulligan's film version of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) ended with the death of its black protagonist, and Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) is set in a harsh Harlem dominated by a coldly ominous drug dealer. By way of contrast, more pastoral films such as Martin Ritt's Sounder (1972) and Gordon Parks's autobiographical The Learning Tree (1969) seemed childlike in their remoteness from the wave of angry films.

One cause of the movies' turn toward rage was the Race riots in the United States in the late 1960s, when cities exploded with despair at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the seeming exhaustion of his movement. Awaiting the arrival of this new wave of films were hundreds of derelict, cavernous downtown theaters, along with thousands of black youths upon whom the Civil Rights Movement had had little effect. The prototype of a new genre, soon dubbed “Blaxploitation” Films by the trade paper Variety, was Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (1971). More than any other movie, Sweetback defined its era. Jangling in its lighting and music track, heady with contempt for the white social order and its cops, the film's success all but invited Hollywood's major studios to rush forward in pursuit of the new audience. MGM's Shaft (1971), for example, played to the crowd by featuring a mouthy, streetwise hero who, in reality, was not an outlaw like Sweetback but merely a plainclothes cop. From the outset, the Hollywood studio version of this black, urban, outlaw culture cynically followed familiar patterns. Cool Breeze (1972) was remade from The Asphalt Jungle, The Lost Man (1969) from Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, and Up Tight (1968) from John Ford's film of an Irish rebellion, The Informer. The Hollywood studios even plundered the horror-movie genre in films such as Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1972).

New Black Cinema

Meanwhile, a younger generation of black filmmakers emerged from academic settings: the film schools of University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California, New York University (NYU), and later from historically black schools such as Howard University. They embraced Van Peebles, Micheaux, and African filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène of Senegal as their cultural models. For the first time, women joined black filmmakers' ranks.

Asserting that black expression could be appreciated on its own terms, this new black cinema aimed to preserve black culture both within the Hollywood system and apart from it. New distributors, including the Black Filmmakers Foundation, California Newsreel, and Women Make Movies, Inc., aimed at select audiences and academic circles rather than mass markets. Yet there were crossovers such as Warrington Hudlin, who made Black at Yale (1977) and Street Corner Stories for the new distributors, but who also penetrated Hollywood, together with his brother Reginald. St. Clair Bourne's Let the Church Say Amen (1972) revealed both a filmmaker and a movement journalist. Women's films ranged from Madeleine Anderson's documentaries, Kathleen Collin's Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), and Ayoka Chinzira's satiric Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People (1985), to Julie Dash's commercially distributed, nostalgic Daughters of the Dust (1991). Others who crossed the line between the avant-garde and the commercial were Charles Burnett with his Killer of Sheep (1977) and Haile Gerima of Howard University with his fable of a clash between African and American sensibilities, Sankofa (1993).

The best known of the new black filmmakers during the 1980s and 1990s was probably Spike Lee, an NYU alumnus. He managed to win large audiences for almost everything he produced—film school exercises, credit-card-financed early efforts such as She's Gotta Have It (1986), television commercials, and promotional pieces. He also directed a string of Hollywood successes, including one of the most politically challenging and commercially successful films of the new black cinema, Do the Right Thing (1989).

As black filmmakers became more prolific, black actors in Hollywood—Danny Glover, Halle Berry, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett, among others—got steady, rather than sporadic, work. By the 2001 Academy Awards, when for the first time in American film history both the Best Actress and Best Actor awards went to African Americans—Halle Berry and Denzel Washington—the steadily expanding black presence in American film seemed to ensure a solid future for the new black cinema.

processed xml | source xml