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!
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

•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)

•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

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…

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