Screening “The Other”:
The Movies, Race and Ethnicity
Gary Handman
Director
Media Resources Center
Moffitt Library
ghandman@library.berkeley.edu
Waaay BC
Native Americans
1870-1900
1619
A Dutch ship brings 20 African
indentured servants to the English
colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
1865
12 million immigrants
arrive from Europe
End of Civil War
1850s
25,000 Chinese
immigrate to the
US
1889
Thomas Edison
invents a moving image medium
A wildly popular, 125-year old entertaining diversion
and information source: maybe more culturally
ubiquitous and influential than print????
•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 and economy.
•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
…A movie is
NEVER only
a movie!
The movies are
cultural constructs
They reflect the culture that
makes them
Culture reflects and is shaped by
the movies it makes
When reading movies as
history or social indicator or
cultural “text”
Use caution!
•Movies are vastly complex artistic,
economic, and cultural enterprises
•Defining “authorship” is always
problematic
•Studio politics and economic stakes
need to be assessed
•Audience and critical reception needs
to be considered
•Movies generally aim to entertain
NOT to inform or edify
The Movies Begin
•Actualities = movies of the real world
(Lumieres: La Vie sur la Vif: Life being Lived)
•Short sketches and routines (often replicating earlier
theatrical forms.
•Trick films (the earliest special effects) – e.g. Melies
•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.
Early Motion Pictures Actuality and Spectacle
What Happened
on Twenty-Third
Street (1901)
Pan-American
Exhibition,
Buffalo, New York 1901
Congorilla (1930)
Birth of the Movies 1880s – early 1900s:
Corresponds with Enormous Societal Changes:
•Political expansionism and colonialism:
•Spanish-American War takes America into the world arena
•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 use and reflect these
cultural and societal changes…
Immigrants
as audiences:
New immigrants
as movie
The movies
as a cultural
port of entry
subjects
& characters…
(The “Poor Man’s Theatre”)
Edison
New York City Ghetto Fish Market
(1903)
Actualities as social and cultural “evidence”
…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
The Movies - A Radical New Art Form
Often Built on
Existing Social and Cultural Notions and
Older Artistic Traditions
•The movies adopt and intensify ongoing
fantasies, fears, stereotypes, and cultural
tropes re race & ethnicity.
•The movies make these fantasies and tropes
a part of the mass culture/cultural
consciousness in unprecedented ways.
•As in other forms of pop culture: The images and
associations on the screen often mean more than
meets the eye: issues of class, gender, nation enter
into the picture.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Edwin S. Porter (1903)
•Based on Harriett Beacher Stowe’s 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 – mild, loyal, and subservient “Good Negro”
See also: Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
Mammies & Bucks (Moffitt & Main Libraries PN 1995.9 N4 B6
2001)
•Michael Rogin suggests film is drained of its antiabolitionist sentiments—drama is between established
“happy” life of Old South/plantation and outsiders who
threaten that way of life.
Edwin S. Porter
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Edwin S. Porter (1903)
Clip 1: Topsy
Clip 2: Tom and Little Eva
Clip 3: Auction of Augustine St. Clare’s Slaves
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: tops for 5 years
•Protested vigorously by the NAACP: first
national political organizing by African Americans
•Riots in major cities
•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
(Los Angeles premiere features actors on
horseback and in hoods outside of the
theater)
David
Wark
Griffith
Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith (1915)
"The real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern
audiences that would transform every man into a Southern
partisan for life."
--Thomas Dixon, Jr.
"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
The Cheat
Cecil B. DeMille (1915)
Sessue Hayakawa
The Cheat
Cecil B. DeMille (1915)
How is he (Tori) portrayed?
How is she (Edith) portrayed?
What narrative and/or psychological
function does Edith’s branding serve?
What emotions (and toward whom) is
DeMille trying to rise?
How does Tori’s social status enter into the
Mix?
…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) – but race issues rarely…
Animated Shorts: 1919-1940: Are We Amused Yet?
•Chinese Laundry Blues (1930?)
•Scrub Me Mama (1943)
Fairly early in the 30s, anti-Semitic
images all but disappear in
Hollywood (except for Disney)
…Why?
1933 – later altered in the 40s
Other ethnic and racial groups
don’t fare as well…
The Mask of Fu Manchu
(1932)
1930s: The rise of identifiable stock character actors:
Bill Robinson, Hattie McDaniel and others…
Stepin Fetchit [Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry]
(1902 - 1985)
•Scene 1: Mammy
(Hattie McDaniel)
•Scene 2: Prissy
(Butterfly McQueen)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
•Based on 1936 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Margaret Mitchell
•Highest grossing film in history of Hollywood until that time
•First drafts include Klan as a virtuous organization
“In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes
come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger, which I do not think
should be difficult”
-- Producer David O. Selznick
(as quoted in Memo from David O. Selznick. Rudy Behlmer, ed.
New York: Viking Press, 1972. p. 147)
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. Stanley Kramer,
1958
Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949
Dir. Mark Robson,
1949
Dir. Alfred L. Werker,
1949
Pinky
Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949
Post-War America:
The Image Begins to Shift:
“Social Problem Films”
Dir. Stanley Kramer,
1958
But…
Old stereotypes die hard…
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
Broken Blossoms (or, The Yellow Man and the Girl)
D.W. Griffith (1919)
Richard Barthelmess
Lillian Gish
"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)
(Biograph, 1905)
Edwin S. Porter