Film Industry

By: Jeanna Penn

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Film Industry

Since its inception, film as a referential medium has played an enormous role in shaping the ideas and ideologies of its audience. In 1895 the Lumière brothers screened their short film, “The Arrival of a Train at the Station.” The film caused several members of the audience to run from their seats in terror, believing the train would burst through the screen and run them down. Character portrayals, too, have often been as believable, influencing the cinema viewer to believe that what she sees on screen is an accurate representation of reality.

The manipulators of this medium have traditionally been white men; therefore, the films they created have been limited by their social and emotional framework. They have contributed to the marginalization of non-white women through the negative images and stereotypes they have presented on screen. Black women have been among those adversely affected by the patriarchal Hollywood movie-making machine. The most obvious evidence is the omission of their images in most Hollywood productions throughout the entire twentieth century. When black women do make an appearance on celluloid, it is both minimal and unrealistic. Hollywood has been slow to warm to black women in front of the camera and even more resistant to the idea of black women behind the scenes. However, in the more than one hundred years during which movie making has become a recognized and profitable art form, black women have gradually taken more control of their own stories and images.

Early Images

In 1915 D. W. Griffith introduced his interpretation of Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman. The result was The Birth of a Nation, a film which would be heralded by critics and protested by civil rights organizations and the black masses. In it, the Reconstruction Era was played out with highly charged scenes depicting black men as violent, ignorant brutes and the Ku Klux Klan as the American South's only chance to regain its greatness. A prominent theme in this film was that the roots of the South's downfall resulted from politically empowering the newly freed blacks and from miscegenation. The Birth of a Nation is considered groundbreaking filmmaking because of Griffith's new storytelling and cinematography techniques, which were unheard of in the new medium. He also introduced the two primary roles for black women in film—roles that actresses would struggle to resist for years after The Birth of a Nation's debut.

These caricatures were familiar to most people, having been a part of poetry, music, and literature for many years prior to the release of the film. One such caricature was the “mammy,” the obedient servant who was always available to care for the plantation owner's children and comfort the distressed white mistress of the house, despite any abuse the mammy received in turn. The caricature was a large woman, dark brown in complexion, an image commonly associated with Aunt Jemima and which denied her any sensuality. This made her nonthreatening to the film's mistress and to the moviegoing public. While some writers and directors allowed her moments of “sass,” she was loyal to the white family that owned or employed her and she would defend them to the death.

Counterbalancing the desexualized mammy figure was the “tragic mulatto.” She was a woman of mixed heritage with fair skin, straight hair and Anglo features. Caught between two worlds, the tragic mulatto was constantly at odds with herself and society. She represented the exotic and was full of sensual energy, allowing white men the opportunity for fantasy while keeping the purity of white women intact. In Griffith's picture, Louise, the mulatto house servant, is abused by her black father and becomes the seducer of her white employer. Louise's advances are interpreted as the manipulative aspirations of a social climber, the consequence of the mixing of blood among the races, and a threat to white society. In this film, as in many of Hollywood's early pictures, the reality of how these women came to be of mixed blood was rarely discussed. Exploitation and rape did not make the final cut.

The politics of color was a reality, too, for the black actresses who tried to obtain the few roles that were available. A black actor's complexion determined which roles she was offered, if any. Paradoxically, Griffith used white actors in blackface to play both the mammy and the mulatto in The Birth of a Nation. A black actor, Madame Sul-Te-Wan, played the role of a wealthy black woman who is insulted by a white woman and reacts with anger, spitting in her face. The scene was edited out of the final cut. The reaction of the black community at large to The Birth of a Nation was one of outrage. Even before its release, the NAACP began a campaign to protest the film.

In the 1934 film Imitation of Life, directed by John M. Stahl and based on the novel by Fannie Hurst, both the mammy and the tragic mulatto receive significant screen coverage. The film centered on the lives of two single mothers—one black, played by Louise Beavers, and the other white, played by Claudette Colbert—and their daughters. Delilah, the black housekeeper, and Beatrice, her employer, start a pancake house using Delilah's secret recipe. Delilah cooks while Bea handles the business, and the two women become successful. An early document of a feminist ideal in mass media, the film celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit that allows these women to survive without the aid of a man. Despite this, Delilah is unable to imagine benefiting from her success. She refuses Bea's offer for her own house and car and instead insists on remaining in her role as the domestic.

In true mammy fashion, Delilah goes to great lengths to care for Bea and her child while her own daughter, Peola, suffers the cinematic fate of the tragic mulatto. As a child, Peola begins to take advantage of her light complexion and Caucasian features by passing for white. It should be noted that at no time during the film does the audience learn the identity of Peola's father. During one rainy scene, Delilah stops by Peola's grade school to drop off her rain boots. When she approaches the teacher looking for her daughter, the teacher responds that there are no colored children in the class. Delilah points to Peola and identifies her as her daughter. Humiliated and ashamed by having her race revealed by her mother, Peola storms out of the classroom. Peola as a young woman, played by a mixed-race actor, Fredi Washington, becomes determined to leave behind her black identity and completely pass for white. The results are disastrous, as she breaks her mother's heart and becomes the victim of abuse by her white lover once he discovers the truth. In the end, Bea ends up with the man of her dreams; Delilah, who has been denied any sort of romantic relationships, dies; and Peola is left to regret the heartache she has caused. While this is one of the first times that the complexities of color politics are addressed on film, the black characters of Imitation of Life remain pigeonholed into the two dominant black female stereotypes.

Gone with the Wind

Hattie McDaniel, in the Victor Fleming adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1939), played what is undoubtedly the most famous mammy role on film. This was not a new role for the actor, who performed in several productions as either a maid, a mammy, or someone's “auntie.” Roles were already limited for women of color at that time, but McDaniel's large physique also played a part in her typecasting. In the film Gone with the Wind, as the caretaker of Scarlett O'Hara, McDaniel's character continued to perpetuate the stereotype despite her tough performance. Opposite McDaniel's Mammy was the oft-quoted house servant Prissy, played by the actor Butterfly McQueen. Her line “I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies, Miss Scarlett” has come to represent the lazy, shuffling slave who is the female counterpart of Stepin Fetchit. Prissy served as nothing more than a source of frustration for Vivien Leigh's character, giving validation to Scarlett's impatient temper. It was Mammy's job to keep Scarlett in check and Prissy's to force Scarlett to rise to the occasion and accept responsibility. In 1939, for her performance as Mammy, McDaniel became the first black actor to receive an Academy Award. She continued to play maids and mammies in film, radio, and television, earning more than $2,000 per week at the peak of her career. Criticized by some African Americans for playing roles they saw as demeaning, McDaniels famously replied, “I'd rather play a maid than be one.”

Later Roles

The 1940s introduced the film audience to the black diva in the person of Lena Horne. She, like many other black women, began her career singing and dancing, her entrée to Hollywood. In Cabin in the Sky (1943), the first all-black musical film, Horne starred alongside Ethel Waters and Eddie Anderson. Waters assumes the role of Anderson's doting wife while Horne plays the beautiful seductress vying for his affections. In the end, Anderson must choose between a pious life and a life of sin. Interestingly, Waters had the personal and professional power at the time to ask for and receive significant changes to the role of the wife, giving her a spiritual dimension that undercut the stereotypical nature of the film's central conflict.

Lying Lips.  Poster for Oscar Micheaux's film, 1939.

Library of Congress

view larger image

One of Horne's most memorable performances came in the 1943 film Stormy Weather, in which she played the female lead and sang the well-known title theme in a story about two entertainers trying to balance love and show business. Horne continued to work in film in the years that followed, but rarely in a speaking role. Because of her insistence, supported by her father and Walter White of the NAACP, that she would not play maids or any other stereotypical roles, film industry executives decided to use her only as a musical grace note. Indeed, the musical genre of the 1940s brought many more black faces to the silver screen in this kind of cameo performance. Singers and jazz musicians were able to step away from roles of slaves and domestics and play themselves. This included Horne, Etta Moten, Hazel Scott, and Ethel Waters. While their time on screen was of considerable value, as soon as their musical number was completed, they left the frame. Their performances were often shot in such a manner that they could be removed for a film's southern distribution.

In 1949 Elia Kazan brought the story of the tragic mulatto to the screen again in the film Pinky. Set in the rural South, the film features a title character, played by the white actress Jeanne Crain, who is a black woman returned from studying nursing in New England. In the North, Pinky had passed for white, a secret kept from everyone, including her grandmother, played by Ethel Waters, and her white fiancé. Much like Imitation of Life, this film explores the tragic duality of the mulatto caricature in America by showing Pinky caught between two worlds. Being white grants her comfort and access to places where she was never accepted before. The black community, on the other hand, is her home, where she can live with the people who know and love her; but with it comes second-class citizenship. Circumstances keep Pinky from returning to the North, and she finds herself attending an ailing white woman. She resents the position of servitude but in the end chooses to remain in the South and to remain black, sacrificing an elevated social position and the love of a white man. For the role of the grandmother, Waters was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1949, making her the second black woman so honored.

Another mixed-race actor, Dorothy Dandridge, became one of the most recognized black actors of her time. Her beauty and presence gained her such roles as the title role in Carmen Jones (1954), co-starring Harry Belafonte, and the female lead in Tamango (1957), an Italian film for which she was paid more than $125,000. Carmen Jones led to Dandridge becoming the first black person ever to grace the cover of Life magazine. Another milestone related to the film would be her nomination for Best Actress by the Motion Picture Academy. It was the first Oscar nomination for a black actor or actress for a leading role. Despite her success, Dandridge rarely escaped the stereotypical roles created for black women. In 1959, after shooting several marginal films abroad, she returned to the states in 1959 to film Porgy and Bess, her last great performance. Dandridge was the embodiment of the tragic mulatto, a beautiful biracial woman who struggles for her identity, which eventually leads to her downfall. In 1965, Dandridge died from an overdose of pills she was taking for depression.

Although Dandridge's tragic life and Oscar nomination have made her the most talked-about black woman star of the 1950s, she was far from the only one. The singer Pearl Bailey appeared in more than half a dozen films during the decade. The remarkable Eartha Kitt moved between the two coasts, starring in the films St. Louis Blues, Mark of the Hawk, and Anna Lucasta on film. Ruby Dee began her remarkable film career with No Way Out and The Jackie Robinson Story and, in 1961, A Raisin in the Sun, which was written by Lorraine Hansberry and featured another great black actor who died young, Diana Sands, as well as Claudia McNeil. All of these women continued to work steadily, if all too infrequently, for decades. The great Ethel Waters appeared in The Member of the Wedding in 1952 and The Sound and the Fury in 1959, utterly dismantling the mammy stereotype by the sheer force of her personality and acting genius.

Imitation of Life was remade in 1959, this time starring the quintessential white 1950s movie star Lana Turner in the role of the white mother and Juanita Moore as the black mother. This time around, the screenplay did not allow the women to be business partners. Instead, Moore remained the maid throughout the film. Her daughter was played by the Mexican Jewish actress Susan Kohner. Moore received the third Oscar nomination for an African American woman for the role.

In the 1960s, a number of black men made their way into films, including the comedians Godfrey Cambridge and Richard Pryor and the handsome, thoughtful leading man Sidney Poitier. Black women, on the other hand, were far more active in the theater. The film and television actors of the future, such as Esther Rolle, Denise Nicholas, Rosalind Cash, Gloria Foster, and many others, were cutting their acting teeth off-Broadway. Diahann Carroll made several films, showing herself to be beautiful, talented, and, as Donald Bogle points out in Brown Sugar, oddly out of sync with the times. Cicely Tyson was utterly in tune with the 1960s and gave several remarkable performances in films such as The Last Angry Man, The Comedians, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but her time was yet to come. The only Oscar nomination of the decade for a black woman went to Beah Richards for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

Black Filmmakers and the 1970s

The post–civil rights era brought forth a new school of black filmmaking as it ushered in the so-called blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Suddenly black directors, though still predominantly male, were able to create larger-than-life characters for a black audience. In films such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), and The Mack (1973), street-smart cops, pimps, and hustlers filled the screens, but women were seen as accessories. Enter the black superwoman in the form of Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). The main characters were women whom the female audience could admire and about whom the male audience could fantasize. Both title characters were action women who fought and loved hard, using their aggressive sexuality as a tool to protect their families and communities. Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier were the mainstays for this type of role, but for other black actors of this time there was little else available. While some black women found strength in these characters, others rejected them because of their over-eroticized images.

Still, these were not quite the only roles available to black women at that time. In 1972, Cicely Tyson starred in the critically acclaimed film Sounder. Having been discovered by Ebony magazine, Tyson began her career as a fashion model before moving into television. Her pinnacle role came in Sounder, with her portrayal of Rebecca Morgan, the matriarch who must hold her family together under harsh circumstances. In the film, the sharecropping family is thrown into chaos after Rebecca's husband is incarcerated. Tyson brought life to the film with her brilliant and emotional performance and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. That same year, Diana Ross was nominated in the same category for her role in Lady Sings the Blues, a biography of the jazz singer Billie Holiday. Her performance was far better than the film itself.

Two years later, Diahann Carroll would continue the trend, and confound her earlier critics, by playing a strong-willed black mother in the title role of the film Claudine (1974). Set in Harlem, the film showed the daily struggle of a single mother trying to raise six children in an unforgiving urban setting. It was also an opportunity to show the depths of black love through the story of Claudine's relationship with the neighborhood garbage man. That same year, Cicely Tyson came back strong in the television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which must be included here because of its effect on Tyson's career and on the portrayal of black women in the media. Tyson's extraordinary strength and dignity in the role were a complete contradiction of earlier stereotypes and, although the character's oppression through life is unflinchingly portrayed, she transcends her victimization.

The 1980s and Beyond

The enormously talented Alfre Woodard followed in the footsteps of Cicely Tyson, bringing dignity and depth to a wide range of roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1983 for Cross Creek. But perhaps the most important film of the 1980s, in terms of black women in Hollywood, was The Color Purple (1985). This adaptation of Alice Walker's novel introduced both Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg to the big screen and gave the talented Margaret Avery her best film role. Avery was nominated for an Academy Award for the film, as was Winfrey. The film itself was controversial, in part because its director, Steven Spielberg, was white and in part because it broke silences about spousal abuse within the black community. As for the actors, Winfrey returned to her popular television talk show. Avery did not work for a year and a half and had primarily small, supporting roles afterward. Goldberg continued to spin a career out of her comic genius, with significant forays into drama, and won an Oscar for her performance in Ghost in 1990. But her popularity and bankability seemed to be nontransferable. Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Essence, “just as Tiger Woods' millions do little to ease the way of Blacks who like golf, Whoopi's singular screen persona does not lend itself to imitation from other Black actresses. There's one Roseanne, one Phyllis Diller, one Lucille Ball. And there's one Whoopi Goldberg.”

The 1990s were the decade when it became possible for the average moviegoer to name more than a handful of black actors. Angela Bassett began making her mark in the 1990s, breaking out in 1993 as Tina Turner in the biographical What's Love Got to Do with It? Lynn Whitfield, Vanessa Williams, Whitney Houston, Halle Berry, Tyra Ferrell, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Vivica A. Fox, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Jada Pinkett Smith, and a number of other black women demonstrated that they had the talent, beauty, and charisma to play everything from romantic leads to gritty character roles. But only Berry broke through to superstardom. The unlikely star of the 1990s was hip-hop pioneer Queen Latifah. Set It Off, released in 1996, allowed Vivica A. Fox, Jada Pinkett, Kimberly Elise, and Queen Latifah to play complex characters who grapple with racism, single parenthood, and homosexuality. Latifah went on to garner an Oscar nomination for her role in Chicago and to star opposite Steve Martin in the comedy Bringing Down the House, both in 2003.

Black women in the late 1980s and early 1990s increasingly found themselves in “above-the-line” roles. As writers, directors, and producers they were now in a position to shape how black women would be portrayed on screen. In 1997, Tracey Edmonds and her production company produced the feature film Soul Food. The story of three sisters and their individual struggles with life and love, it grossed over $43 million upon its initial release. Edmonds and her husband, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, went on to produce several more films, including Hav Plenty, Light It Up, and the live action film of the cartoon Josie and the Pussycats. Gina Prince-Bythewood directed Love and Basketball in 2000, the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a black woman.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, characterizations of black women in film were expanding. The mammy and the tragic mulatto were no longer the only roles that a contemporary audience would accept. When Hattie McDaniel received the Oscar for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind in 1939, some thought that black actors were finally being considered a part of the larger film community. However, it would be twenty-four years before Sidney Poitier won Best Actor for Lilies of the Field and fifty-one years before another black woman, Whoopi Goldberg, would win an Oscar. Not until 2002 would a black woman win an Academy Award for Best Actress. That year Halle Berry received the award for her performance in Monster's Ball. In the film, Berry plays a waitress with a husband on death row and an obese son who dies tragically after being struck by a car. The only escape from her pain is in the arms of the white police officer responsible for her husband's execution. Many within the black community saw Berry's acknowledgement by the Academy as a victory. However, the role is a bitter reminder that, while black women have made many advances within the film industry, some basic stereotypes have yet to be abandoned.

See also Berry, Halle; Dandridge, Dorothy; Filmmakers Independent; Horne Lena; McDaniel, Hattie; and Waters, Ethel.

processed xml | source xml