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Screening “The Other”:

The Movies, Race and Ethnicity

Gary Handman

Director

Media Resources Center

Moffitt Library ghandman@library.berkeley.edu

Waaay BC

Native Americans

1619

A Dutch ship brings 20 African indentured servants to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.

1870-1900

12 million immigrants arrive from Europe

1889

William K. Dickson (Edison labs) invents a moving image medium

1850s

25,000 Chinese immigrate to the

US

A wildly popular, 120-year old diversion and entertainment.

An increasingly complex artistic endeavor involving various “authors” and “actualizers” (screenwriters, directors, actors, technicians)

A highly exportable commodity: a global good with impact on global culture.

A unique form of “grammar” (a new way of describing/viewing/representing the world and/or of telling stories)

A cultural product that comprises various genres and styles: fiction to non-fiction and forms in-between

…It’s ONLY

A

Movie!

A. Hitchcock

…but a movie is NEVER only a movie!

Movies are a cultural construct

They reflect the culture that makes them

Culture reflects and is shaped by the movies it makes

"Film is more than the twentieth-century art.

It's another part of the Twentieth-Century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film.

If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The

Twentieth century is on film....You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film constantly watching ourselves."

--Don Delillo (The Names)

When reading movies as history or social indicator

Use caution!

•Movies are complex artistic & economic enterprises

•Studio politics and economic stakes need to be assessed

•Audience reception needs to be considered

“ Every Film Is a Documentary”

--Bill Nichols

Documentaries of Wish Fulfillment

Documentaries of Social Representation

Documentaries of Wish Fulfillment

•Deal with imagined realities

•Requires that the viewer suspend disbelief – that we engage with imagined worlds.

•Ultimate Goal: to entertain

•Document the image in front of the camera

•Document the cultural beliefs and assumptions, fantasies, fetishes of the times: serve as a kind or cultural

“text” (rather than a straight historical record)

Documentaries of Social Representation

Imaginative representation of historical or personal reality

Lay claims to representing the “Truth”

(unlike films of wish fulfillment)

A “Discourse of Sobriety” (along with politics, history, economics)

Use of evidence drawn from the “real” world

Make arguments and claims about the world outside of the theater

Goal: to have the viewer believe in what is being represented; to act on those beliefs in concrete ways

…But the Earliest Motion Pictures were neither…

Actualities = movies of the real world

(La Vie sur la Vif: Life being Lived)

Short sketches and routines (often replicating earlier theatrical forms.

Trick films (the earliest special effects)

Newsreels and Travel Films:

(increasingly pitched to audience taste for the sensational, exotic & culturally alien)

The “Cinema of Attractions”: focus on spectacle rather than story: popular for the same reason world’s fairs and other exhibitions were popular.

Birth of the Movies 1880s – early 1900s:

Correspond with Enormous Societal Changes:

Political expansionism and colonialism

Industrial and technological revolutions

Demographic shifts – movement from rural to urban

Enormous increase in immigration

*1870-1900: 12 million immigrants

Growth of urban Middle Class

Increase in leisure time

The movies reflect these cultural and societal changes…

20the Century Notions of Race & Ethnicity & The Movies

The movies adopt and intensify ongoing fantasies, fears, stereotypes, and cultural tropes re race & ethnicity.

The Evolution Cinematic Metaphor / Metonymn re Race

The movies make these fantasies a part of the mass culture/cultural consciousness in unprecedented ways.

Birth of the Movies 1880s – early 1900s:

Correspond with Enormous Societal Changes

Immigrants as audiences: The movies as a cultural port of entry

New immigrants as movie subjects & characters…

…And targets

Cohen’s Advertising Scheme

Edwin S. Porter (1904)

… One of earliest filmic examples of anti-semitic stereotyping.

Porter spools off a whole series of “Cohen” films between 1904 and 1905

Edwin S. Porter

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Edwin S. Porter (1903)

•Based on Harriett Beacher Stowes wildly popular serialized novel (1852) – written in response to 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (300K copies sold in first year)

•Porter’s 1903 version: One of earliest “full-length” films

•Tom = American film’s first named black character

•Filmed only 38 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation

•Borrows many of its cinematic conventions from earlier theatrical productions

(“Tom Shows” and Vaudeville)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Edwin S. Porter (1903)

•Dozens of subsequent film versions

•Establishes many of stereotypes of African Americans that would persist over the next century:

•The “happy darky” (what Donald Bogle calls “The Coon”)

•The “tragic mulatto” as sex object

•The Mammy

•The pickanniny

•The Tom

See also: Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks

(Moffitt & Main Libraries PN 1995.9 N4 B6 2001)

Edwin S. Porter

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Edwin S. Porter (1903)

(Biograph, 1905)

Birth of a Nation

D.W. Griffith (1915)

•Based on a play by the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr.

•The most popular and profitable early film –

First box office blockbuster

•Protested vigorously by the NAACP

•Censored in some states (notably Ohio) – leads to Supreme Court ruling in 1916 holding that films can be legally censored (because of their vivid psychological effect on women, children and

“lower classes”)

•Coincides with the revitalization of the KKK

David Wark Griffith

"It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

-President Woodrow

Wilson upon seeing the film

Birth of a Nation

D.W. Griffith (1915)

Broken Blossoms (or, The Yellow Man and the Girl)

D.W. Griffith (1915)

The Cheat

Cecil B. DeMille (1915)

Sessue Hayakawa

…Or: What’s a Nice Jewish Boy

Like You Doing in a Face Like

That!

Into the 30s…

Studios are the in business of making profitable films, not questioning prevailing mainstream social and political views and assumptions.

Some images fade, while others persist and solidify

Some studios (e.g. Warners) toy with

“social problems) – race rarely…

Animated Shorts: 1919-1940: Are We Amused Yet?

Chinese Laundry Blues (1930?)

Scrub Me Mama (1943)

The Mask of Fu Manchu

(1932)

Stepin Fetchit [Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry]

(1902 - 1985)

Gone with the Wind

(1939)

•Based on 1936 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Margaret Mitchell

•Highest grossing film in history of Hollywood

Separate Cinemas: Movies Beyond the Cultural Mainstream

Yiddish Films

(1930s-40s)

Oscar Micheaux

Independent Black Cinema

(“Race Movies”)

(1920s-50s)

Edgar G. Ulmer

World War II: The Expedients of Democracy

Or Redefining & Refiguring “The Other”

Know Your Enemy: Japan

Frank Capra [for the US Army)

(1945)

The Negro Soldier

Frank Capra [for the US Army)

(1944)

Post-War America:

The Image Begins to Shift:

“Social Problem Films”

Dir. Mark Robson,

1949

Dir. Stanley Kramer,

1958

Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949

Pinky

Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949

Post-War America:

The Image Begins to Shift:

“Social Problem Films”

Dir. Stanley Kramer,

1958

But …

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Dir. Blake Edwards, 1961

Cold War Paranoia:

Aliens from

Outer Space & Elsewhere

“…He’s a Mean Mutha…”: 1970s Blaxploitation

The 70s and 80s:

Raging Against the Machine:

The Politics of Generation,

Identity, and Race

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