Film and Filmmakers

By: Luca Prono

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Film and Filmmakers

Numerous film scholars have challenged the representations of African Americans in American films, citing them as ongoing evidence of white domination of the film industry in the United States. A constant negotiation has taken place through the decades between on-screen assertions of white superiority on the one hand and the demands of African Americans and their oppositional stances on the other. Much of the debate on cinematic racism has centered on the ways in which early African Americans, slavery, and freedom have been represented since the filming of the silent classic Birth of a Nation (1915), the founding text of the American movie industry.

Early Films

D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas F. Dixon Jr.'s novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, is often hailed as the first indication that motion pictures had become a significant industry. Yet, as the film historian Everett Carter has pointed out, the racial stereotypes underlying the film also mark the beginning of cinematic racism. With its simplified portrayal of race relations in the antebellum South, Birth of a Nation nurtured the “Plantation Illusion,” depicting white masters as benevolent and aristocratic and black slaves as contented and loyal. The movie tells the story of the conflicting loyalties of two families, the Stonemans and the Camerons, separated by taking opposite sides in the Civil War. It depicts antebellum southern life as running “in a quaintly way that is no more,” as one of its first subtitles puts it. The subtitle is followed by a scene that shows African Americans laughing and happy as they ride on an old cart taking them to their work on the plantation. Another scene shows the Camerons mingling with their happy slaves, who, a caption informs us, are given a “two hour interval for dinner … in their working day from six to six.” During this break, we are informed, “the slaves enjoy themselves.”

Birth of a Nation's representation of the Reconstruction period is equally problematic, as it reflects the presence of racial and sexual phobias. Faithful to the Plantation Illusion, the film draws a sharp contrast between the loyalty of former slaves in the South and the corruption of northern blacks. While the slaves owned by the Camerons remain loyal to their masters and the traditions of the slaveholding South, African Americans from the North are corrupt, and nothing good can be expected of them. Moreover, African Americans of the Reconstruction period are represented as aggressive opponents of white southerners. Thus, the film presents the Ku Klux Klan as justified in its excesses because of threats posed by newly emancipated blacks. When a gang of African American soldiers assaults a group of beleaguered whites, Griffith's caption reminds the audience that whites are merely defending “their Aryan birthright.”

The Reconstruction period also marks the onset of episodes of sexual violence in Birth of a Nation. Significantly, the climaxes of the film are scenes in which a northern black and a mulatto named Silas Lynch attempt to rape white women. As African Americans take on important government positions, their first act is to pass laws to legalize miscegenation. They also organize demonstrations carrying signs demanding “Equal rights, equal marriage.” Mulattoes of both sexes are targeted as particularly dangerous because they combine the bestial sexuality of African Americans with the intellectual superiority of whites. Griffith's characterization of African Americans as rapists and violators of womanhood powerfully functioned to restore the masculinity of southern males by establishing them as protectors of white women's sexual virtue.

Thirties

Birth of a Nation set the paradigm for a genre of plantation romances that became popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In their own movies, such black filmmakers as Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) and George Randol (1895–?) tried to counter stereotypical depiction of African Americans. Yet such mainstream Hollywood products as Dixiana (1930), Mississippi (1935), Jezebel (1938), and the hugely successful Gone with the Wind (1939) continued to portray the relationships between white planters and black slaves as unproblematic and natural. In these 1930s films African Americans are depicted as nonthreatening and as sharing the atmosphere of leisure within the “Big House” with their white owners. Such a fantasy was instrumental in providing sentimental diversion from the economic hardships of the decade, yet its influence stretched to the 1990s with Jefferson in Paris (1995), which portrays Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent father to his slaves. The film proved troublesome for conservative viewers because it showed Jefferson fathering several children with his slave Sally Hemings before that claim was validated. The film, however, fails to fully explore the discrepancy between Jefferson's theoretical writings against slavery and his own practices as a slaveholder. Notably, the movies from the 1930s, unlike Jefferson in Paris, show African Americans as asexual nurturing figures, exemplified by the character of Mammy in Gone with the Wind. When the Civil War appears in these films, as it does in Gone with the Wind, it functions only as historical background for the sentimental melodrama at the center of the narrative.

Birth of a Nation , 1915, directed by D. W. Griffiths. In this scene, the character Gus (played in blackface by Walter Long, a white actor who specialized in portraying villains) is surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan.

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Later Films

The 1930s portrayals of happy and loyal slaves living on plantations were challenged four decades later in the Blaxploitation film Mandingo (1975). Generally written, directed and produced by African Americans, Blaxpoitation films featured a graphic description of violence and sexual relationships in an urban setting and showed black heroes or antiheroes eventually winning over whites. The film Mandingo, in which a slave owner encourages one of his slaves to be a bare-knuckle fighter without realizing that the slave is having an affair with his daughter, is often described as exploitative and criticized for its voyeuristic violence with heavy sexual overtones. The film critic Ed Guerrero, however, praised Mandingo for adopting an African American perspective on slavery through its depictions of slaves' rebellions, escapes, and strategies of resistance. The commercial success of Mandingo guaranteed the filming of a sequel called Drum in the following year.

Mel Gibson's character in The Patriot (2000) displays benevolence toward his African American workers, who, the film makes clear, are not slaves but free men who have chosen to work for him in his cotton plantations. The film, which the African American director Spike Lee has described as pure “Hollywood propaganda,” attracted much criticism for its embellished portrayal of race relations. The model for Gibson's character was, in fact, a racist slave owner, and the idealization of a white farmer in the context of eighteenth-century South Carolina is bound to be problematic. The only white racist in the film is saved by a fellow African American soldier and immediately becomes a convert to racial equality. The Patriot also shows African Americans gaining their freedom after twelve months of service in the Continental army, even though South Carolina was one of only two states where this clause was not valid.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the American cinema confronted the trauma of slavery through allegories as well as historical reconstructions. John Sayles's film The Brother from Another Planet (1984) features a slave alien (“the brother”) who has crashed in contemporary New York City. As the alien attempts to settle down in Harlem, two slave hunters from his home planet arrive and try to recapture him. The film points to the similarities between the past institution of slavery and the present confinement of African Americans within urban ghettoes.

Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) adopts a different strategy by mixing historical facts and fictional invention. The narrative of the film was inspired by a revolt in 1839 aboard the slave ship Amistad led by Sengbe Pieh, who was also called Joseph Cinque. The revolt was followed by a famous trial that declared the African slaves free on American soil. The film significantly departs from earlier stereotypes of happy slaves. Spielberg's movie, however, has been criticized for its repression of African American voices and its privileging of whites as speakers. The silencing of African Americans and the focus on John Quincy Adams during the trial scenes are cited as evidence of Spielberg's tendency to minimize African American agency. This stifling of the slaves' voices is also a significant departure from historical fact. Many of the captives learned to read and write English while they were on trial. Contrary to the historical record, the movie shows them as speaking in their African dialect throughout. This change is one of several significant alterations that the producer, Debbie Allen, considered necessary in order to make Amistad more appealing to the general public. According to Allen, listening to the slaves' native language was part of the film's power.

Oscar Polk  An early African American film actor, Oscar Polk appeared in such motion pictures as Underworld (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), and Cabin in the Sky (1943). Like many African American actors of the day, however, the talented Broadway performer was often relegated to supporting roles as slaves or low-lifes.

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Portrayals of African Americans as happy and loyal slaves were challenged by later films that showed African Americans actively fighting for their freedom. Edward Zwick's Glory (1989) reconstructs the history of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment—the first Northern unit of black volunteers to fight in the Civil War, under the command of a young white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick. The film climaxes with the events of 18 July 1863, when the regiment mounted a brave assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Fort Wagner was never taken, and the Union regiment was decimated. Nevertheless, the black volunteers' self-sacrifice succeeded in persuading skeptical whites of the worth of African American soldiers. Glory celebrates a moment of perfect racial harmony in the history of the United States. Despite its good intentions and the spectacular final battle scenes, however, the film lacks depth of characterization. The only complex character is the white colonel. The African American soldiers, though played by such first-rate actors as Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington, remain flat stereotypes. Equally disappointingly, the film defines whites exclusively as racists.

Jonathan Demme's Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison's complex best-selling novel, is a fictional treatment of the real story of a runaway slave, Margaret Garner, called Sethe in the novel and the film. Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, the film focuses on Sethe's decision to kill her own child rather than surrender her to re-enslavement and highlights the consequences the woman must endure when the child returns to her as a ghost. The experience of slavery is narrated from a mother's point of view—a mother whose fear of losing her children is more intense than physical pain. The central character's emotions, rather than the plot, become the center of the film's account of slavery. Beloved commemorates the role of family anchor that black women were forced to assume when family members were separated from each other and black men were removed from their positions as fathers and household heads.

The lives of African American slaves were also explored in several television dramas. The late 1970s witnessed the great success of Roots (1977), the series based on Alex Haley's saga covering seven generations of African Americans, from the enslavement of Haley's African ancestors to his own genealogical quest. The series represented the complex relationships among generations and races engendered by slavery. Roots became one of the most popular programs in the history of American television and stimulated public interest in African American issues and history. A successful sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, was broadcast in 1979. The Roots saga challenged conventional screen descriptions of whites and blacks, proving that a television show with positive black characters and white villains could attract a large audience. Despite its graphic displays of whippings, rapes, and torture against African Americans, Roots did not characterize slaves simplistically solely as victims of white oppression but showed their potential for reaction and rebellion. The series also introduced a new influential television format: a blend of fact and fiction wrapped up in soap-opera conventions.

Television Documentaries

The lives of African American slaves were also explored in several television documentaries of the 1990s. As in fictional treatments on film, television documentaries on slavery are increasingly focusing not only on a historical reconstruction of events but also on the psychological dimension of America's “peculiar institution.” PBS's four-part documentary Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (1998) reconstructs the experience of slavery through the testimonies of slaves and their owners, with actors reading from slave narratives and diaries of plantation owners. The episodes in the series, “The Terrible Transformation,” “Revolution,” “Brotherly Love,” and “Judgment Day,” deal with different aspects of the American paradox in which whites fought for their own independence while simultaneously enslaving their black laborers. The director Orlando Bagwell constructed the documentary to expose America's fraudulent attitudes toward race. Bagwell argues that “there are certain ideas that we believe as truth that have nothing to do with reality.” He cites Thomas Jefferson's early writings and notes that what Jefferson says about black people are conclusions that he drew “with no scientific basis.” At one point in the documentary, Karen Hughes White, a descendant of one of Jefferson's slaves, reads a section of his will that lists the values of his possessions: “Negro man, Barnaby, who is valued at $400, Negro woman, Betty Brown, who is worth nothing. Negro woman Ursula and her young child, $300.”

Ken Burns is one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful documentary filmmakers who have dealt with the issue of slavery. His best-known work is the eleven-part series The Civil War (1990), which popularized the genre of documentaries made for television. As in Burns's other oeuvres, The Civil War adopts an epic mode of narration that partly overlooks social and political distinctions among Americans in favor of emphasizing shared traditions and the establishment of examples for the whole nation to follow. Such a nationalistic and celebratory approach, which secured funding for Burns from such large corporations as General Motors, has been subjected to harsh criticism from more radical artists. For example, the controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has argued that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was more willing to fund Burns's documentary than they would be to support the making of “provocative documentaries about contemporary events” simply because Burns's film “offended nobody.”

Although the lives of early African American slaves have been the subject of several movies and documentaries, mainstream productions on the colonial period such as Jefferson in Paris and The Patriot have glossed over the most unpleasant aspects of America's system of slavery. Thus, they have taken into account predominantly the economic interests of film and television studios rather than the need to show the enduring influence of slavery on American society. In her essay “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement,” Toni Cade Bambara states that stereotyping of African Americans has been a constant in the American film industry, spanning decades as well as different film trends:

"I could wallpaper the bathroom with Variety headlines from the days of Hallelujah!, through the forties accord between DuBois/NAACP and Hollywood, through the “Blaxplo” era, to this summer's edition covering Cannes and the release of works by [the directors] Lee, Rich, Vasquez, Duke, and Singleton and still ask the question: Never mind occasional trends, when is the policy going to change?"

(p. 118) A similar plea for a change in the politics of representation of African Americans has come from Ed Guerrero. In his pioneering study Framing Blackness, he warns the reader that cinematic views of slavery, whether propounded by the original white hegemonic impulse or the oppositional black perspective, run the risk of being one-dimensional. Thus, characters and plots become prey to Hollywood's economic needs, always eager to satisfy the latest social trends. Guerrero believes that remembrance has lasting significance: whether they are mainstream or independent, films should convey the enduring relevance to and influence of slavery on all Americans in the twenty-first century.

Amistad , 1997, directed by Steven Spielberg. Shown here, at center, is Djimon Hounsou as Joseph Cinqué.

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See also Adams, John Quincy; American Revolution; Amistad; Black Family; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Emancipation; Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; Hemings, Sally; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Language; Literature; Military; Mulattoes; Racism; Reconstruction; Resistance; Sexuality; Slave Insurrections and Rebellions; Slave Narratives; Slavery; Stereotypes of African Americans; Union Army, African Americans in; Violence against African Americans; Visual Arts; and Women.

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