Challenging Racism and Sexism

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ABSTRACT
Title o f Dissertation: CHALLENGING RACISM AND SEXISM
THROUGH CINEMATIC DISCOURSE:
BLACK WOMEN FILM AND VIDEO MAKERS
Frances K. Gateward, Doctor o f Philosophy, 2000
Dissertation directed by: Professor A. Lynn Bolles

Women’s Studies
This dissertation examines the work o f contemporary Black American
women film and video makers as counter-cinema, a viable alternative to the rigid
formulaic structure o f Classical Hollywood Narrative form and its ideologies. Close
textual analysis o f the films and videos directed by Julie Dash, Camille Billops,
Beverlyn Fray, Madeline Anderson, Portia Cobb, and Cyrille Phipps reveals how
they utilize the distinct codes o f their respective media to construct discourses that
oppose the racist and sexist hegemony o f mainstream media and American culture. I
concentrate on five core themes identified in their work: criticism o f Hollywood’s
exclusionary practices; the relations between American history, popular memory,
race, and gender; the cultural archetype o f the Black maternal figure; colorism; and
media production as a form o f social activism.
CHALLENGING RACISM AND SEXISM THROUGH
CINEMATIC DISCOURSE:
BLACK WOMEN FILM AND VIDEO MAKERS
by
Frances K. Gateward
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty o f the Graduate School o f the

University o f Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
o f the requirements for the degree o f
Doctor o f Philosophy
2000
Advisory Committee
Professor A. Lynn Bolles, Chair

Professor Douglas Gomery
Professor Gloria Gibson
Professor Roger Meersman
Professor Rodger Streitmatter
UMI Number. 9967901
Copyright 2000 by
Gateward, Frances K.
All rights reserved.
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© Copyright by
Frances K. Gateward
2000
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank m y family, especially my mother, for their continuing
encouragement and support.
Though they were not able to serve on my committee, I also wish to recognize and
thank Gina Marchetti, Sheri Parks, Gene Robinson, and Robert Kolker for the
knowledge and support they have given me during my years o f graduate study. One
could not ask for a better group o f mentors, whom I also consider friends..
-u-
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Pape
Introduction................................................................................................ 1
Chapter One: The Problem is not how to Make a Political Film

But How to Make a Film Politically.........................27
Chapter Two: Documenting the Struggle........................................ 72
Chapter Three: Exploding Myths, Expanding Boundaries............. 101
Chapter Four: The Color Com plex................................................ 123
Chapter Five: Imagery for Action................................................... 138
Conclusion............................................................................................. 162
Filmography...........................................................................................169
Bibliography o f Cited Works...............................................................177
INTRODUCTION
The early 1990's brought forth a new hope for a renaissance o f Black
filmmaking. Inspired by the growing popularity o f rap music and hip hop culture, as
well as the success of three films produced well-beneath the $40 million average for
a Hollywood feature —Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986), a film budgeted at
$175,000 that made over $8 million at the box-office, Robert Townsend’s
Hollywood Shuffle (1987), the $100,000 film that earned more than $7 million, and
Reginald and Warrington Hudlin’s House Party (1990), costing $2.5 million and
earning over $27 million -- Hollywood released a watershed o f Black directed films
in 1 9 9 1 Those films were: Jungle Fever. New Jack City. True Identity. The Five
Heartbeats. Bovz N the Hood. House Party n. Talkin Dirtv After Dark. Hangin with
the Homebovs. A Rage in Harlem. To Sleep with Anger. Up Against the Wall. The
Tapes o f Dexter Jackson. Chameleon Street. Straight Out of Brooklyn. Strictly
Business, and Livin’ Large. Though these films were only fifteen o f the four
hundred and fifty features released that year, it was the first time such a high volume
o f Black-themed films played in commercial theaters since the Blaxploitation
movement o f the 1970's. It was also the first time since the race films o f the silent era
that so many Black-themed films were actually directed by Black directors. But
there was another film released that year, another independent, low-budget film that
generated a profit -- Julie Dash’s Daughters o f the Dust. Recognized internationally
for its artistry and technical achievements, winning the prize for Best
Cinematography at Sundance and the Black Filmmakers Prize for Best Film, it is the
first feature film directed by a Black American woman to be nationally distributed,
yet it did not receive the notoriety and press attention it truly deserved.
Dash’s groundbreaking feature is set in 1902, on the Sea Islands o ff the coast
o f Georgia and South Carolina which, according to Collins, “are most often
understood as the place where Africa is most present and Africanisms most evident
in the United States” (1998). The Gullah Islands were the entry point for many
captive Africans into the United States. The physical isolation made it possible for
enslaved Africans to be smuggled in illegally as late as 1858, and coupled with
cultural isolation from the mainland, it was possible for elements o f African
language, culture, and tradition to survive. Daughters o f the Dust takes place over the
course o f a single day as a Gullah family comes together before several members
depart for the industrial centers of the northern United States. Structurally complex
and visually stunning, the film concentrates on the women o f the Peazant family,
constructing Black female subjectivity, while at the same time highlighting the
legacy o f slavery, the importance o f family, and the need to maintain cultural
memory.
It took Dash over twelve year to make the film because she encountered
problems with financing. As she explains, “Originally, when I finished the
screenplay, the studios were courting me...they figured that since Daughters was a
Southern period piece it had to be like the The Color Purple or Sounder. It wasn’t
and they had absolutely no idea what to do with it” (1991, A5). Eventually securing
production funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Women Make Movies,
the Georgia Council on the Humanities, the National Black Programming
Association, and American Playhouse, Dash sought Hollywood distributors after
completion, including Disney, Columbia, and Warner Brothers. The film was
considered too risky, and was rejected. As Dash explains, “I ’m asking them to sit for
two hours and look at black women, black women they have never seen on the screen
before. And because it is not the type of black woman they are used to looking at or
the type of black story they are used to looking at, they disengage from it” (Dash
1991).
The popular media outlets chose instead to promote the masculinist, urban
dramas that would continue for the next few years. So much so, that members o f this
new generation o f filmmakers, Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Allen and Albert
Hughes became stars in their own right, appearing regularly on college campuses, at
film screenings, and on television. The mainstream press even went as far as to
designate Spike Lee a Black leader, featuring him on such programs as Niehtline and
MacNeil/Lehrer. Little attention was paid to the films featuring the stories o f Black
women. One such overlooked film was Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1993), about
a seventeen-year-old college bound high school girl whose life is complicated by an
unplanned pregnancy. It was directed by Leslie Harris, the first Black American
woman to have a film released by a major Hollywood distributor (Miramax). _I Like
It Like That (1994), directed by Damell Martin, the first Black American woman to
direct a movie produced by a Hollywood studio (Columbia Pictures), about a woman
and her relationship with her husband and three children was similarly ignored. It
was as if this handful o f Black male directors existed in a vacuum. No thought was
given to the long history o f Black filmmaking, which started with the founding o f the
first Black production company formed in the United States, the Foster Photoplay
Company in 1910. Nor was any attention paid to the myriad o f Black film and video
makers working outside the Hollywood system, filmmakers renowned around the
world like the Emmy-Award-winning Marlon Riggs, director o f the documentaries
Ethnic Notions (1987), about the evolution o f the stereotypes that have fueled anti-
Black prejudice, and Tongues Untied (1990), an experimental work on the
homophobia and racism experienced by Black gay men; and Haile Gerima, the
Ethiopian-born director o f feature films such as Bush Mama (1976), which focuses
on the consciousness-raising o f a woman on public assistance, Ashes and Embers
(1982), about the challenges faced by a Black Vietnam veteran when he returns to
the United States, and Sankofa (1993), a film about slavery and resistance in
Jamaica. And o f course, there was no acknowledgment o f Black Women filmmakers.
This study attempts to redress the omission o f Black women filmmakers that
has occurred in both scholarly studies and the popular press. I make the claim that
their work serves as critical examples o f radical cinema, in opposition to classical
film aesthetics and its politics. Their use o f self-reflexive film form disrupts
narrative unity, establishing a more politically progressive and less manipulative
relationship between the spectators and the films and videos. The Black women
media artists highlighted in this study use their respective media to challenge the
derogatory and one-dimensional depictions so common in the mass media. They use
film and video to celebrate the Black community and to construct Black female
subjectivity in their own terms. Because they posit their work as interventionist tools
for social change, I closely examine how they utilize the distinct codes o f cinema to
construct a discourse that opposes racism and sexism.
Black women have been involved in filmmaking almost from the beginning
o f cinema, and not just in front o f the camera. From the start, they were engaged in
the cinema as a means to fight racism, celebrate Blackness, and to improve the Black
community. In 1916, May Childs Nemey and Mary White Ovington helped
mobilize the production o f Birth o f a Race, the film produced as an response to the
racist epic Birth o f a Nation (Cripps 1993). Eloyce Patrick Gist directed dramas
during the 1930's to inspire racial pride and Black unity (Gibson 1994, 21). During
the same period Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson, both trained as
anthropologists, captured Black cultural life in ethnographic film. Today there are
dozens o f Black women film and video makers, working in every genre and
category: documentary and fiction, live action and animation, shorts and features,
and experimental. Though their work varies in style and content, most approach their
work with artistry and purpose. As filmmaker Michelle Parkerson explains, “We use
film and video to validate our herstory and experiences, where before there was only
distortion” (1987, 12).
Recognized throughout the world, their critical visions resist the prescribed
cultural behaviors determined by boundaries o f race and sex, and bring to film
concerns not addressed by the mainstream media industries: The celebration o f Black
artists in films like But Then. She’s Bettv Carter (1980), a portrait o f legendary jazz
vocalist Betty Carter; Remembering Thelma (1981), a profile o f dance instructor and
performer Thelma Hill, a founding member o f the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and the
New York Negro Ballet; Vamette’s World: A Study of a Young Artist (1979), about
the life and w ork o f painter Vamette Honeywood; Alice W alker: Visions o f the Spirit
(1988), a film about the Pulitzer Prize-winning author; Mama’s Pushcart (1988), a
tribute to Ellen Stewart, founder o f New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre
Company: community issues, such as housing discrimination in Brick Bv Brick
(1982); the sexual abuse o f children in Secret Sounds Screaming (19871: racism in
education as examined in Skin Deep (1990); and medical care in Aids and Black
Women (1991). Black lesbian identity is another subject explored in films like
Storme: Ladv o f the Jewel Box (1987), a portrait o f Storme DeLaverie, a male
impersonator with the Jewel Box Revue during the 1940's; Remembering Wei Yi
Fang. Remembering Mvself (1992), an autobiographical documentary by Yvonne
Welbon about her experiences living in Taiwan; and Sisters in the Life (1993), the
story o f a Black lesbian who fell in love with her best friend in junior high school.
Black women film and video makers also celebrate the contributions o f Black
activists in works such as Fundi: The Storv o f Ella Baker ( 1981). a biography o f the
Civil Rights activist, who, among other things, led the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee; and A Litanv for Survival: The Life and Work o f Audre
Lorde (1994), a portrait o f the award winning poet/essayist/activist who dedicated
her life to the equal rights o f Blacks, women, and gays and lesbians. This study
highlights some o f those concerns, and the means by which Black women
filmmakers offer resistance to the mainstream media industries’ reinforcement of
sexist and racist hegemonies.
Review o f the Literature
Film, like the other forms o f mass communication, is a complex and
multifaceted entity, existing simultaneously within the realms of art, technology,
industry, and economics. As a cultural product, it has the ability to create, reproduce,
and sustain multiple ideologies. However, early film scholarship did not have such
concerns. Much o f the literature concerned abstract, theoretical debates about the
nature and function o f the new medium. The debates centered around two primary
issues: distinguishing film from older, traditional arts (painting and theater primarily)
and determining what and where the foundation o f film as an art would be laid. Film
scholarship, including film history, that examined the area of cultural representation,
noting the methods by which cinema, and Hollywood in particular, has characterized
those outside what has been posited as the defined norm, became the particular
province o f scholars located in marginalized communities. Film scholars such as
Richard Dyer, Clara Rodriquez and Mary Ann Doane2, to name only a few, have
conducted research on what Gomery and Allen term “image studies, examining how
various social groups within society have been depicted in the films o f a particular
era” (1985, 158). Their work, and that o f their colleagues, reveal the hegemonic
practices o f Hollywood films, working against people that are non-White, female,
aged, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual, physically or mentally disabled, and
without access to wealth and power. Within popular culture, we can see that the
discriminatory operations are manifested in a variety o f forms. They include the
practice o f rendering entire groups invisible, stereotyping, constructing diverse
heterogeneous cultures as monolithic, infandlization, and covert racial codings.
For decades, Blacks Americans and other minority groups have fought the
exclusionary practices o f mainstream media. Despite a pact made between the
NAACP and the major studios in 1942, and more recent hearings in 1982 by the Los
Angeles Human Relations Commission, a class action discrimination suit against the
television networks and film studios in 1993, investigations by the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights in 1997, a boycott o f television in 1999 by Latino/a Americans and a
national protest by the NAACP also targeting television, the lack o f minority
employment on all levels, both in front o f and behind the cameras, continue to plague
the film and television industries. The lack o f diversity in film is such a normal
occurrence that it has no effect on the box office, e.g. Star Wars (1977) $207 million,
Rain Man (1988) $ 172 million, and There’s Something About Marv (1998) $ 140
million3. In fact, this is such a common occurrence that it would be easier to list the
films where Black Americans actually appear. Response to these minority protests
were taken by many as a minor issue, and was even made fun of. This fall, the ABC
television program I f s Like... You Know repeatedly referenced the lack o f people o f
color on television, using it as the basis o f several jokes, despite the fact that the
entire cast is White. If, as scholars suppose, film and televison serve as fantasies for
wish fulfillment, then utopia for many would be a world o f young, White,
heterosexual, bourgeois men. It sends a message to those outside o f the status quo
that their history, culture, achievements, concerns, and lives are o f no significance
and no interest.
On those occasions when the Other is depicted, it is often in the form o f
stereotypes, one-dimensional characterizations that represent oversimplified and
exaggerated attitudes, usually derogatory. Those who employ them justify their use,
claiming that it would take too long to fully flesh out every character in media forms
with prescribed running times, or explaining that they help us to make sense o f the
world. But, if we go back to the scholar who coined the term, Walter Lippman, we
find stereotype described as:
N ot merely a way o f substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing,
confusing reality. It is not merely a shortcut. It is all these things
and something more. It is the guarantee o f our self-respect; it is the
projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own
position, and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly
charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress
o f our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves
safe in the position we occupy. (1956,96).
Speaking from a position o f privilege, Lippman reminds use that stereotypes are not
neutral. They, and their deployment, are used to dehumanize, to provide grounds for
discrimination, and to alleviate guilt. And though all social groups stereotype others,
it is important to note, as Stain and Shohat do, that all stereotypes are not equal and
that they can, and do, have real effect in the world. “Stereotypes o f some
communities merely make the target group uncomfortable, but the community has
the social power to combat them; stereotypes o f other communities participate in a
continuum o f prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered
people, placing the very body o f the accused in jeopardy” (1994, 183). This is
cogently demonstrated by Jewell, who argues that stereotypes of Blacks directly
effected the rollbacks in social policies during the Reagan/Bush years (1993).
Images o f peoples o f color have existed in motion pictures from the time o f
the m edium ’s inception. As early as 1895, the year Louis and Auguste Lumiere
unveiled their cinematographe in Paris, Thomas Edison was recording images o f
West Indian women dancing before the camera. Yet by virtue of race, class, and
gender privilege, peoples o f color, as well as women and others, have had virtually
no control over the creation o f their images. For Blacks it meant the transference o f
the already existing stereotypes from literature and vaudeville to the silver screen.
The research concerning Blacks and film, much o f it written by Black
scholars, has focused on stereotypes, noting the methods by which cinema, and
Hollywood in particular, has characterized the largest racial minority in the United
States, Blacks. The book-length studies, which include Peter Noble’s The Negro m
Films (1948), Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act (1953), Jim Pines’ Blacks in Films
(1975), James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (19761. Daniel Leab’s From Sambo
to Supersoade (1976), Thomas Cripps’ Slow Fade to Black (1977), James Nestby’s
10
Black Images jn American Films (1977), Donald Bogle’s Toms. Coons. Mulattoes.
Mammies, and Bucks (1989), Kenneth Cameron’s Africa on Film (1994), James
Snead’s White Screens/Black Images (19941. Todd Bovd’s Am I Black Enough for
You? (1997), and Mistaking Africa (1999) by Curtis Chaim, delineate the basic
archetypes • the mammy: the maternal, large, dark-skinned, and usually asexual
woman who selflessly serves her employers or enslavers as in Mr. Blandines Builds
His Dream House (1948) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989); the brute: the hypersexual,
physically threatening Black man with a penchant for violence, usually represented
as the rape o f White women e.g. Rocky HI (1983); the Tom, described by Bogle as
the “hearty, stoic, generous, and selfless individual who, though enslaved, insulted
and harassed,” remains faithful to Whites in power (1989, 5) as in the 1982 film The
Tov: the Coon, Black buffoons with exaggerated physical and facial expressions
used for comic relief, such as The Fifth Element (1997); the Tragic Mulatto, a
woman o f mixed race who suffers from an identity crises, as in Devil in a Blue Dress
(1995); and the Jezebel, the licentious, seductive Black woman i.e. The Big Hit
(1998). Each o f them is related to history, developed to justify slavery and later
discrimination, and also to facilitate White identity —the tragic mulatto to discourage
miscegenation, the Tom and Coon to alleviate guilt over enslavement, and the brute,
dehumanized and reduced physicality to justify assignment o f harsh laborious work,
and with hyper-sexuality to excuse forced reproduction and later, used an excuse for
lynching4. The two most circulated and utilized stereotypes o f Black women, the
mammy and the jezebel, worked much in the same manner as the others, the mammy
11
as in the way o f the Tom, and the Jezebel to misplace the responsibility o f White
male rape and the use o f Black women as reproductive labor. They also functioned,
and I would argue they continue to, enhance the image o f White femininity. New
attitudes about the nature o f womanhood, which emerged during the Victorian era,
defined the paragon o f womanhood as frail, virginal, and morally above reproach.
As Carby points out, the characterization o f Black women permitted the construction
o f the cult o f womanhood5.
In the 1980's, a few new stereotypes emerged, incarnations o f those
mentioned above, most notably the welfare mother and criminalized male youth.
The years o f the Reagan/Bush administration were like a realization o f the Dirty
Harry series, featuring Detective Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood). These
conservative films were anti-liberal, misogynist, homophobic, and racist. According
to the ideologies o f the films, the federal government has allowed too many freedoms
and the justice system caters to criminals. Only a rogue cop, willing to ignore civil
rights, use violence, and circumvent can save us from ourselves. It was as if the
premise o f the film series was embodied in the rise of the extreme right and the
ascendancy o f Reagan, who publicly quoted dialog from the fourth film o f the series,
Sudden Impact (1993), “Make my day.” The re-articulation o f race constructed an
America where Whites were under siege. Threatened by the fear o f increasing
minority populations the Right launched a virulent campaign against immigrants of
color brought to the fore the image of the lazy, perpetually pregnant welfare queen.
It didn’t matter that there were more Whites receiving public assistance than Blacks,
12
that more Black women are infertile than White women, or that 40% o f single
mothers are White (Usdansky 1996, Roberts 111). President Reagan invoked the
image o f the welfare queen often. He used Chicago resident Taylor as his prime
example o f a welfare cheat, exaggerating her case to the point where she had “80
names, 300 addresses, 12 social security cards, whose tax-free income alone is over
$150,000" (Edsall and Edsall, 1991 p. xx). Even Clarence Thomas, during his
canidacy for a seat on the bench o f the Supreme Court invoked the stereotype,
describing his sister, Emma Mae Martin as a a deadbeat in order to describe himself
as a clear contrast (Painter 1992). What was never mentioned was that she had been
on public assistance only temporarily so that she could care for an ailing aunt, to the
benefit o f Thomas, who was because o f her sacrifice, able to continue his studies.
The wave o f Black films released by Hollywood at the time reflected these
images. I see them as a second generation o f Blaxploitation films, for like the first
wave in the 1970's, they took place in urban landscapes, featured young black men,
centered on criminality, and made millions for the Hollywood studios. They also
share another similarity: the sexist depiction o f women. Several film scholars, such
as Michelle Wallace (1990), Thomas Doherty and Jacquie Jones (1991), and Rinaldo
Walcott (1992), and bell hooks (1992 and 1993), have found that Bovz N the Hood.
New Jack City. Rape in Harlem. Harlem Nights, the early films o f Spike Lee, and
others offered a remasculinization o f the Black male, at the expense o f the Black
woman. These films, coupled with the welfare queen, crack head, gang banger,
Willie Horton6 images projected in the news and political rhetoric suggested that the
13
Black life existed only in a monolithic, drug-ridden, poverty-stricken ghetto. Critics
even lambasted Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing because it took place in a Brooklyn
neighborhood and there were no drugs presented in the film! Audiences were
shocked when they saw Waiting to Exhale in 1995. Blacks were presented living in
a setting other than Harlem and South Central (the film takes placed in Arizona), as
middle-class w ith professional careers, and as beautiful and glamorous.
Just as modes o f racism have become more covert within the culture, so too
has its manifestation in film. As Anna Everett points out, under the guise of
empathy, films like Disney’s Cool Runnings (1993) infantalize Blacks, while others
used racial codes like Black dialects or modes of speech for characterization, such as
the villain in Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, also released in 1993
(1995). Another good example is Disney’s animated feature The Lion King (1994).
Because, as discussed in the next chapter, Hollywood narratives almost always have
a secondary story o f romance, we are presented one here. Unlike the other
anthropomorphic animals, the object o f desire is given blue eyes, essentially defining
her as White. And, as shown in chapter three, White femininity is valued more highly
than others. But even more obvious, is the racial coding o f the villain’s lackeys.
While every other character speaks so-called proper English, the two hyenas, lowly
scavengers, speak with Black slang and inflection, associating Blacks not only with
criminality, but criminality in its lowest form. Another trend noted by many film
scholars is that o f White paranoia, what Henry Giroux describes as Whites under
siege. Using Grand Canvon as an example, he explains that these films
14
“mobilize the fears and desires o f White folks who recognize that cultural differences
are here to stay, but don’t want to call their own racism or complicity with economic,
social, and political inequalities into question” (1993, 13). This is also demonstrated
in Marked for Death (1990), Falling Down (1993)7, and The Trigger Effect (1996).
Robert Stam and Louise Spence have reminded us that when examining
constructions o f racism and colonialism in film, we must go beyond characterization,
and interrogate the cinematic elements themselves (1983). Image studies, as noted
above, have provided insightful observations about the workings of racism in
narratives, but the approach is limited. Film is a specialized medium with its own
particular codes and conventions, and those must be considered as well.
As Jean-Louis Baudry contends, the cinematic apparatus, the technology
itself, in inherently ideological (1975). Just as Bordwell explains how Hollywood
lighting foregrounds a particular type o f glamour and beauty (1985), Richard Dyer
has pointed out that the aesthetic technology o f lighting has racial implications -
“advantaging white people in representation and o f discriminating between and
within them, but also suggesting a special affinity between them and the light”
(1997, 84). Using the example o f Rising Sun (1993), starring Wesley Snipes and
Sean Connery, Dyer illustrates the way lighting privileges the White actor over the
Black one. In several scenes, the lighting can not accommodate the range in skin
tones, and the filmmakers chose to highlight Connery, leaving Snipes to fade into the
background. Color film, like light meters, are balanced for White skin tones. Julie
Dash discussed the difficulty o f finding film stock that could render Black skin tones
15
well for Daughters o f the Dust, and chose AGFA film because it worked better than
the stock produced by Kodak.8 Other cinematic elements at work may include
subject positioning (how spectator identification is encouraged), the use o f music
(where once jungle drums represented threatening savages, we now hear rap),
mise-en-scene, and other visual associations. More complete analysis o f racism in
film therefore called upon the use o f structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and
Marxism —discussions that form subsequent chapters in this study.
As film scholarship expanded in the 60's, 70's and 80's, so too did film
production by Black filmmakers. Much o f the growth o f film scholarship was
concentrated on the productions o f Hollywood, an obsession which continues today.
Only a few scholars were interested in applying the structuralist models o f analysis to
Black film: Clyde Taylor’s discussion o f Modernist and Post-Modernist aesthetics in
relation to race (1989), Manthia Diawara’s application of psychoanalytic film theory
(1988), and the late James Snead’s thoughtful analysis o f race and film codes in
White Screens/Black Images (1994). Their important work brought to the fore
concerns o f Black film aesthetics, the construction o f Black sexuality, defining the
tradition o f Black filmmaking, and Black cultural nuances. What they excluded was
close examination of gender, and the films made by Black women. This left it to the
work o f feminist film scholars.
Feminist approaches to film studies, fueled by the contemporary Women’s
Movement o f the 1960's and early 1970's sought to investigate the manner in which
the film participates in the maintenance o f patriarchal society, and how cinema could
16
be used a s tool for social change. As E. Ann Kaplan states, the feminist approach to
film “emerged from the daily, ongoing concerns o f women re-evaluating the culture
in which they had been socialized and educated” (1983, 23). Their examinations o f
film, and Hollywood productions in particular, reveal the methods by which film aids
in defining and controlling female sexuality, as well as the place o f women in the
society as a whole. Like Marxist critics, feminist film scholars acknowledge the
dominant culture’s ability to label, limit, and define groups o f people.
From its beginnings, feminist analysis o f the relationship between women
and film have centered around three areas:
1. The restoration of women to film history
2. Image studies centered on characterization and stereotypes
3. Development of critical theories
Like most history, the history of film, until very recently, utilized what
Gomery and Allen call “the great man theory, the belief that history is made by
inspired acts o f outstanding individuals, whose genius transcends the normal
constraints o f historical context” (1995, 53). This methodology, which disregards
other influences upon changes or stasis, is truly a great man approach —since
traditional histories focus primarily on the contributions o f individuals o f the male
persuasion, and even more specifically, White men o f economic means.
Feminist approaches to film history involve a re-examination of the history of
the medium in order to incorporate the contributions o f women to the development
o f film economically, aesthetically, socially, and technologically. Studies attempting
17
to do so revealed a hidden history o f women in positions o f directors, producers,
editors, writers, and technicians.
A large portion o f early feminist film analysis was like that o f Blacks in film,
images studies. They too, concluded that the perpetuation o f stereotypes, this time
based on gender, functioned to maintain the status quo. Maijorie Rosen’s Popcorn
Venus and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, the two first book length
studies, as w ell as work by other scholars, linked the stereotyped myths concerning
women in society to the characterizations o f women in Hollywood film. But again,
images studies were found to be limited. Debates revolving around issues o f positive
images (just what constituted a positive image?) initiated a new focus. Rather than
concentrating on the single issue o f content, this new area o f study concerned issues
o f textual production ~ how the operations and structures o f film form construct
meaning. Beginning with Hollywood and expanding to the work of independent
women filmmakers, feminist film scholars reinvigorated the discipline and brought,
like the scholars on Black film, interesting, innovative, and insightful and revealing
research. But they, too, were exclusionary. As in the pre-title to the groundbreaking
anthology But Some o f Us are Brave (1982), in the area o f film studies - All the
Women are White and all the Blacks are Men. Missing from the literature and
theory were Black women.
Following in the tradition o f the W omen’s Movement9, feminist film theorists
have, as Wiegman explains, “duplicated the homogenizing practices o f American
culture by adopting a theoretical paradigm that asserts transculturally and
18
transhistorically the primacy o f gender, thereby rendering race, class, sexuality, and
ethnicity as secondary inscriptions o f differences and not as structures integrally
linked to one another” (1991, 310). Though feminist theories have begun to question
this practice, relatively few scholars are conducting research on the texts produced by
women o f color10.
Methodology/Organization
This study seeks to continue the pioneering work o f scholars like Gloria
Gibson, Jaqueline Bobo, Gwendoyn Audrey Foster, and E. Ann Kaplan, to help fill
the gap in the literature and to recognize the work o f Black women media artists,
whose achievements have been overlooked for far too long. O f course, I do not
claim this study to be definitive, for there are too many Black women producing
film and video and there are too many decades to explore to address them all
adequately here. But I hope my research can serve as an acknowledgment o f the
contributions o f Black women filmmakers have made to cinema, as a celebration of
their artistry, and as a useful and informative study o f the possibilities o f film as an
interventionist and revolutionary tool.
Using social context and close textual analysis as my interpretive tools, I
attempt to reveal how particular Black American women film and video makers use
the specific elements of film and video-- mise en scene (setting, costume, props,
lighting, figure behavior), sound, composition, editing, and narrative—to critique
mainstream media practices as discourse, constructions o f signification that are
products o f social, historical, and industrial formations rooted in relations o f power.
19
Specifically, I explore how these filmmakers articulate oppositional challenges to the
systems o f domination based on race and gender. For the purpose o f this study, I use
the term race as defined by Omi and Winant: “a concept which signifies and
symbolizes social conflicts and interests referring to different types o f human bodies”
(1994, 55). The term Black, rather than African American, is used because the social
construction o f race is based on phenotype, particular physical characteristics, and
not culture. This study focuses on both race and gender, and is informed by the work
o f Black feminist scholars like Hazel Carby (1987, 1996), Barbara Christian (1985),
Angela Davis (1991), Patricia Hill Collins (1990), bell hooks (1981, 1992, 1990),
Gloria Hull (1982), Audre Lorde (1984)Barbara Omolade (1983), and others, Black
women scholars who have developed a rigorous and rich intellectual tradition about
“the simultaneity o f oppression” (Hull et al., 1982).
Through the years I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity
to watch hundreds o f films and videos created by Black women artists in film
courses, at festivals and retrospectives, at museums and art houses, at conferences,
special university screenings, in film archives, and in commercial theaters, I chose
the films included in this study based on a number o f criteria. First, they were made
by filmmakers who have asserted their identities in public and in print as Black
American women filmmakers, with the stated intention to redefine the image o f
Blacks, and especially Black women, on the screen (Harris 1986, Moon 1991, Dash
1992, Sandler 1994, Phipps 1998). Second, the films included are all readily
available for sale and rental by national distribution companies, easily accessible for
20
others. And lastly, I chose them because they are exemplary examples o f the five
core themes I’ve identified in the work o f Black women filmmakers: 1) the critique
o f Hollywood and mainstream media; 2) the revision o f history and the restoration o f
Black American women to cultural memory; 3) denigrating stereotypes and their
effects; 4) the internalization o f racism as embodied by colorism; and 5) filmmaking
as political practice.
I examine each theme in the five chapters that follow, considering the ways
that Black women film and video makers use their chosen medium to address the
intersecting oppressions o f race and gender, as well as in some instances class and
sexuality. Using close textual analysis, I attempt to demonstrate how their work
functions as an active form o f dissent, a counter-cinema that opposes the values and
ideologies circulated by Hollywood. I analyze the relation o f the films to culture;
focusing on narrative structure and form, gender and racial stereotypes, the plot
patterns employed in seemingly progressive mainstream film, and the use o f film as
praxis. Each chapter discusses the construction o f common cultural practices in
mainstream texts, discussing their detrimental effects on the lives o f Black women
and the ways films and videos made by Black women work in opposition, revealing
the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary strategies Black women use to survive and
to challenge the status quo.
Chapter one lays the groundwork for the formal analysis in this study. It
includes a historical survey o f the development and debates o f the major theories
concerned with cinematic form and its relation to ideology. In the second half of this
21
section, I apply the theories to illustrate the way narrative form and film structure
communicate ideology, using Julie Dash’s short film, Illusions as an example. It is
an apt film to begin my study, for it challenges the form o f the classic realist text
directly, at times mimicking its style while also providing a scathing critique —o f the
Hollywood industry, o f the America’s false democracy, and o f race relations in the
United States.
In chapter two I build on Dash’s attack on Hollywood’s exclusionary
employment practices, focusing on how it leads to exclusion within the films
themselves, specifically within what I argue to be a new genre, the Civil Rights
drama. The chapter begins with a delineation o f the genre, its common characters,
plots, and themes. Revealing the hegemonic ideology within these films, I introduce
an independent film that provides a valuable contrast, the original short The Lone
Walk Home, demonstrating that as Black women work to intervene in contemporary
culture, so too do they try to effect the memories of the past.
Chapter three continues the exploration of form introduced in chapter one and
the discussion o f Hollywood in chapter two, by focusing on a stereotype common in
commercial features, the archetype o f the Black mother, whose deconstruction in
Finding Christa challenges conventional cinematic convention, this time in non
fiction film. The work of documentary filmmaker Camille Billops provides
illustration o f how Black women’s films address issues o f self-definition, self-
realization, and ultimately selfhood. In her critique o f gender roles, Billops provides
an alternative perspective on family and motherhood, countering the representation
22
o f Black motherhood. Beginning with an examination o f the image o f the Black
mother, I demonstrate the currency this centuries-old archetype still has today, using
the example o f Whoopi Goldberg and a number o f films and television programs.
Billops’ films, Suzanne Suzanne and Finding Christa present us with two examples
that reveal the artificiality of the myths o f motherhood and the nuclear family,
Hollywood’s role in the perpetuation of those myths, and again, the politics o f film
form.
Chapter four considers a m otif that recurs not only in the films and videos o f
Black women, but also in literature: internalized racism and its articulation in beauty
ideals. Like motherhood, the role o f sex object, related to physical attractiveness, has
constrained the lives o f women. Though all women are affected by a system that
places value based on an ideal o f unattainable beauty, the demands o f physical
attractiveness are experienced by women o f color differently than it is for White
women. For Black women, the primary concerns are o f hair texture and skin tone.
Hairpiece: A Film for Nanny-headed People. Lockin’ Up. and A Question o f Color
address the media’s perpetuation o f the beauty myth and its inherent racism. But
more than just treatises on hair and skin tone, the films attempt to change viewers
attitudes, encouraging them to reject internalized racist precepts.
The last chapter looks at the continuing struggle for Civil Rights. As
demonstrated in chapter two, the struggle for racial equality is considered to have
occurred from only 1954-1968. Chapter five concerns the continuing struggle, and
the contributions o f three Black women media artists who make film and video as an
23
form o f resistance: Madeline Anderson, Portia Cobb, and Cyrille Phipps.
Finally, in the conclusion, I re-examine the issues I have raised in the study,
considering additional questions and areas for further study.
24
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. For more information on the box office grosses o f these films see Kendall (1994)
and Rhines (1996).
2. These scholars represent only a tiny fraction o f the important work on the
representation o f social groups in film. Richard Dyer has written several definitive
essays and book-length studies on gays and film, while Clara Rodriguez has
examined images o f Latina/os. Mary Ann Doane is a leading feminist scholar in the
area o f melodrama and the Women’s film.
3. Box office figures were obtained from the Internet Movie Database,
http://us.imdb.com
4. Angela Davis provides a compelling explanation o f the use o f this stereotype in
Women. Race, and Class (1983).
5. See also W hite (1985).
6. During the 1988 presidential campaign television advertisements for Republican
candidate George Bush criticized a Massachusetts prison furlough program in an
attempt to prove that the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Governor Michael
Dukakis was soft on crime. The ads used William J. Horton, Jr., a Black man
convicted o f murder who, released under the furlough program, left the state o f
Massachusetts and assaulted a couple in Maryland. The ads were carefully
constructed to play upon the fears o f White Americans. Horton, who regularly went
by the name William, was referred to as Willie. As Katherine Hall Jamison points
25
out, “One might trace the familiar "Willie" to the naming practices o f slavemasters,
to our patterns o f talk about gangsters, or to the sort o f benign paternalism that
afflicts adults around small children. Whatever its origin, in discussions o f murder,
kidnapping, and rape, Willie summons more sinister images o f criminality than does
William” (www.rain.org/~openmind/jamiso2.htm). In addition, the political ads
featured close ups o f Horton and the image o f convicted prison inmates exiting a site
o f incarceration through a revolving door while the voice over described his actions
as torture and terrorizing. The advertisements powerfully played upon the already
circulating stereotypes o f Black men as violent animals, raping White women,
pushing drugs, and killing indiscriminantly.
7. The actor Michael Douglas is an interesting case. During this time period he
continually played the role o f a White man under attack. He was especially
threatened by career women —Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and
Disclosure (1994).
8. It is ironic that AGFA no longer produces film stock.
9. See Caraway (1991), Davis (1983), Giddings (1984), Hill Collins (1990), hooks
(1981), Lorde (1984)Terborg-Penn (1978).
10. Bobo (1999), Foster (1997) Gaines (1988), Gibson (1987, 1991, 1994, 1995), and
Kaplan ( 1997) are among the few who are doing close critical work on films by
women o f color.
26
CHAPTER ONE:
THE PROBLEM IS NOT TO MAKE POLITICAL FILMS
BUT HOW TO MAKE FILMS POLITICALLY
The title o f this chapter is taken from a maxim proclaimed by the Dziga-
Vertov1 Group, the cooperative that from 1968-1973 produced and released the films
directed by one o f the most radical filmmakers o f modem film history, Jean-Luc
Godard. Unlike many filmmakers, most notably those o f Hollywood who seek to
address social issues solely through content, Godard and many o f his contemporaries
like Oshima Nagisa and Glauber Rocha equate the process o f production with a type
o f praxis, where social and political theory are worked out in both content and form.
Recognizing that the structure o f a film is as much a bearer o f ideology as the story it
contains, these filmmakers, in their critiques o f Western capitalism and its values,
reject the conventions o f classical Hollywood realist texts, opting for film forms that
challenge mainstream film practices and the cultures that produce them.
This chapter introduces the theoretical approaches I use in this dissertation to
explore the work o f Black women directors as cinematic discourse. I begin with a
historical overview o f the most significant theories concerning film form and
ideology. The second section is an analysis o f a film structured very much in the
anti-realist tradition, Julie Dash’s Illusions, released in 1983. The film critiques the
construction o f race and gender in mainstream film and, through self-reflexivity 'the
politics o f production, serving as an example for the film theories that explore the
27
relations between ideology and form.
From the very start, film scholars avoided what Giannetti describes as the
“heresy o f the paraphrase, the naive separation of form and content” (1999,6), by
focusing not only on the story, but its discourse as well. Early film theory provided
some interesting and insightful thoughts concerning the nature o f film as an art form,
questioning the relation between the medium and reality. It w as not until the 1960's,
however, that theories about film moved from issues o f art to issues o f ideology.
Linguistic theories o f language structures, psychoanalytic approaches, and Marxist
theories focusing on social practice were adapted by film scholars to explore the use
o f film as a form o f communication, issues o f identification and subjectivity, and the
function o f film within the wider culture industry - all noting the importance o f film
form and its function as a signifying practice. None o f these theories interrogated
hierarchies o f power in relation to race, and only recently gender. Yet as many
cultural studies scholars have demonstrated, they still work as useful methodologies
o f analysis when combined with theories o f socic-cultural relations.
Film Form and Film Theory
I. Classic Theory
As early as the silent era, approaches to both film production and film
criticism were, as described by Andre Bazin, one o f cinema’s first and foremost
theorists, “between two opposing trends: those who put their faith in the image and
those who put their faith in reality” (1967,43). Divided along the binary opposites
o f realism vs. formalism, the debate centered on the age-old question o f the function
28
o f art - Should it imitate the world as perceived or should it offer interpretation?
Those who championed the realist position valued film for its ability to
mechanically reproduce reality. These theorists did not argue that film actually
reproduced reality, but, noting the iconic relation o f film to the objects recorded,
celebrated those films that were constructed in a style that minimized mediation as
much as possible. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, valued the technology of film as
a positive development in the ability to recreate reality in a way previously not
possible. According to his approach, film is uniquely able to record the existing
material reality, capable o f capturing the transitory world (1960). Bazin, the most
noted o f the theorists in the realist camp, championed film makers like Jean Renoir
and Vittoria de Sica, directors who made extensive use o f the long take and shots
composed with a deep depth o f field. Bazin thought that excessive editing distanced
the viewer from a sense o f the realistic and removed ambiguity by forcing
perspective and visual emphasis, resulting in a more passive cinematic experience.
Long takes, shots of unusually long duration, reduce the reliance on editing and
allow events to transpire in real time, and when combined with deep depth of field,
viewers have a “more active mental attitude...and make a more positive contribution
on his part to the action in progress” (1967, 54). This position put him at odds with
those who valued the use o f technique and the manipulation o f cinematic elements as
a style o f artistic expression: Rudolf Amheim, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov.
An author o f numerous writings on visual perception and the psychology o f
art, Rudolph Amheim disagreed with the work o f theorists like Bazin and Kracauer,
29
arguing that the cinema is not analogous to the human senses and that the unique
nature o f cinema as an art is in its inability to reproduce reality. According to
Amheim, if film can not match human perceptions o f the real world, then it should
not attempt to do so. Rather, the medium should be used expressively. The
limitations o f the medium, the absence o f the human voice and color (He wrote
during the silent era.) and the lack o f three-dimensionality heightened film as an
abstract art form. He saw the technological advances o f synchronized sound and
color film processes as a boon to realists, reducing the artistry o f the medium, a
lament shared by many contemporary cinematographers2.
Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, a theorist who put his ideas into practice,
also based his theories on a comparison to human perception. He argued that the
kino-eye, the apparatus o f film, is superior to that of humans. As demonstrated in his
numerous works, most notably Man With a Movie Camera (1929), cinema is able to
construct the world in ways physically impossible for the human eye. The optical
illusion o f motion pictures can manipulate time by accelerating or decelerating rates
o f speed and even suspending it through the use freeze frames. Film has the power
to manipulate space through composition and camera movement. It can create
movement where there is none in reality through the process of animation and
through the use o f editing, play with motion, time, and space. Vertov’s concept o f
the kino-eye was tied directly to issues o f ideology. In fact, he was one o f the first
theorists to link film structure with politics.
30
A committed Socialist and supporter o f the newly formed Soviet Union,
Vertov was engaged in the production o f agit-prop films, cinema whose purpose was
agitation and propaganda in service o f the state. Lenin demonstrated his
commitment to film as the most important o f the arts, by the creation o f the world’s
first state run film school, Vsesoyuzni gosudarstveni institut kinematografi/All-
Union State Institute o f Cinematography (VGIK), in 1919 and the bestowal o f
motion pictures a special role in the formation o f the nation - as an educational and
organizing tool. Film could powerfully present the Revolution to a population of
immense size with diverse languages and cultures, and with varied levels o f literacy.
The first films produced were newsreels and documentaries, and Vertov, with his
theory o f the kino-eye, was an advocate o f the non-fiction form. One o f the first
critics o f Hollywood narrative structure, Vertov believed that dramatic narratives
served as a bourgeois opiate for audiences and that the cinema, with its superior
ability to picture the world, should be used to expressively reveal truths o f the world,
kino-pravda (cinema truth).
Another theorist/practitioner, a formalist contemporary o f Vertov also
concerned with film structure and ideology was Sergei Eisenstein, the filmmaker
responsible for the theory o f Soviet montage editing. By the 1920's, the stylistic
practices favored by the Hollywood film industries had already become
conventionalized. As I will discuss later in this essay, the driving force in the
structure o f films in the Hollywood tradition is the narrative, and all o f the cinematic
elements are engaged to highlight the narrative, efface the process o f production, and
31
move the narrative forward. Eisenstein constructed his narratives very differently
and felt that the organizing force o f a film should be first and foremost editing. His
complex montage theory, based on Marxist dialectics, involved the juxtaposing of
shots related not by continuity precepts but by conflict. This conflicting joining o f
thesis and antithesis creates more than the sum o f the parts. It results in a synthesis
o f greater emotional response and meaning. He explained this approach through the
use o f Japanese ideograms, where the combined symbols o f dog and mouth do not
communicate dog’s mouth - but bark. His theory, which distinguished five types of
montage: rhythmic, metric, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual, was realized in films
such as Potempkin (1926) with its remarkable Odessa Steps sequence, and the
highly radical October (1928), the experimental narrative where Eisenstein fully
tested his approach.
In the late 1940's and through the 1950's, the dominant methodology o f film
criticism was the auteur approach. Developed by critics such as Lindsay Anderson
and furthered by those o f the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, who later became the
directors o f the French New Wave, this author-based approach attempts to apply the
romantic notion of the artist as revealed in the text to the cinema. More an
evaluative method than a theory, auteurism regards film as a medium o f personal
expression, claiming that, despite the collaborative production process, a director is
able to impose on a production his/her own personality stamp. Critics using this
method would, in viewing the ouvre o f a director, identify recurring themes and a
consistency o f style. Though problematic in a number o f ways3, this approach
32
valorized film as a legitimate art form and forced a shift in critical thinking away
from debates over reality, to concerns with issues o f aesthetics and meaning.
II. Modem Theory
Film theory has always been an interdisciplinary area o f study. The
realist/formalist debate drew heavily from the field o f the traditional studio arts, and
the auteur approach borrowed from both art history and literary studies. The most
prolific period o f theorizing about film, the late 1960's through the 1970's, also
appropriated critical methodologies from other disciplines, adapting and merging
them into what would become the three most prominent trends in film studies -
semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.
Semiotics
The most significant influence on modem film theory has been semiotics, the
scientific study o f signs, for it provided a more systematic, controlled, and scientific
methodology for film analyses. Though the term was first coined by American
philosopher Charles Pierce, it is work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure that has had
the greatest impact.
Unlike the work of his predecessors, whose studies focused on how language
shifted over time (diachronic), Saussure concentrated on language as a rule-governed
system (synchronic) at a given moment in time, asking not what meaning is created,
but how the elements o f language are configured to produce its effects. The crux of
his theory is centered on four basic tenets: 1. Language is a social system that is
coherent, orderly, and susceptible to understanding and explanation.
33
2. Language is not an adjunct to reality, but formative o f it. 3. Language is
constructed o f two parts, the langue (set o f rules and norms) and parole (individual
acts o f expression) and 4. The smallest unit o f study, the sign, is composed o f two
parts: the signifier, that which is visible, audible, or present (a sound, image, object,
or symbol) and the absent concept to which it refers, the signified (Saussure 1966).
Though his conception may not seem so radical, it is truly emendatory in that it
defines the relationship between signifier and signified as completely arbitrary and
not natural. All signs are therefore cultural constructs that take on meaning through
convention. This aspect o f Saussure’s approach is perhaps the most compelling, for it
laid the foundation for studies linking ideology with signifying practices.
Another linguist, Roland Barthes, building on Saussure’s work, saw language
as the foundation o f culture, and communication as a symbolic process whereby
reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Using the example o f a
picture, from the publication Paris Match, o f a Black Senegalese soldier saluting the
French flag, Barthes demonstrated how the image made use o f connotative signs,
secondary meanings imposed by the culture, and not denotative signs, those with
explicit and straightforward meanings, to communicate a colonialist ideology (1972).
I find this the most intriguing aspect o f semiotics and structuralism, for if the
meaning o f a sign is not natural and if reality is mediated by language, it suggests
that changing the language would result in a different reality. Mulvey as discussed
below applied it to film, calling for a new cinematic language. We can also see this
illustrated by the recent debates over the use o f gender-neutral language, the attempts
34
by minority groups to name themselves, and by oppressed groups reclaiming gibes
(i.e. bitch, nigger, and queer) in an effort to neutralize the power of the epithets.
After Christian Metz first applied semiotics to film, in an attempt to
determine if film actually functioned as a language, theorists like Jean-Pierre Oudart
used semiotics, along with psychoanalysis, to determine the methods by which film
structure creates subjectivity for the viewer by stitching her/him into text (1977).
Nick Browne took Oudart’s concept o f suture further, explaining that the positioning
o f the viewer occurs not only through occular methods (shot/reverse shot editing and
point-of-view shots), but also through a complex reading process that makes use o f
more subtle rhetorical structures (1975), touching on aspects o f identification that
were soon to be elaborated by those applying concepts o f psychoanalysis to film.
Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalytic approaches to film analysis are often referred to as
reception theory, for the methodology does not attempt to locate psychoses in the
characters, but examines the relation o f the spectator to the text, or, as some would
argue, the spectator in the text. The essence o f the psychoanalytic approaches is
desire and its relation to questions o f pleasure, identity, and subjectivity. Critical
film theory uses psychology as a cultural theory, adapting the ideas o f several noted
psychology theorists, primarily Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.
Most applications o f Freudian theory involve his famous (and considered in
some circles, infamous) Oedipus complex. Put rather simply, the complex involves a
process o f identity formation, whereby a child develops a personality and a sexual
35
identity. According to Freud, the basic force which drives everyone is the Pleasure
Principle, the constant seeking of gratification. Because society could not function if
everyone were to satisfy their desires at will, the Reality Principle takes hold, forcing
us to repress those desires not socially acceptable. The repression o f these desires
forms the unconscious. To keep these repressed desires from building to a point o f
psychosis, safety valves exist that offer a glimpse into the unconscious mind: jokes,
what is termed Freudian slips, and dreams, the symbolic fulfillment of unconscious
desires. Freud’s Oedipus complex, a theory o f personality formation based entirely
on the repression of desire, is also a socialization theory whereby one learns his4
place within the social hierarchy.
Before a child reaches this stage o f the Complex, he exists in a triangular
relationship formed by the himself and his parents (a male and female). When the
child begins to experience a incestuous desire for the mother, he is threatened with
castration by the father, and thus, in an effort to avoid punishment, identifies with the
father, learning to take his role in society. The desire for the mother is placed into
the unconscious, and through displacement, the adult male desires other women5.
Jacques Lacan’s theory of the symbolic, like Freud’s Oedipus complex, is a
process o f socialization, but differs in that it is based, like semiotics, on linguistics.
According to Lacan, our concept of self, the world, and our place in it is determined
by the acquisition of language. Lacan’s process involves three periods o f
development: the Imaginary, when the child has no clearly identified sense o f self;
the Mirror Stage, where the child recognizes its own body and its similarity to that o f
36
others (hence the mirror), and lastly, the Symbolic, when language in acquired. The
last two stages are the periods o f most interest to film theorists. In the Mirror phase
o f development, the child sees the other body, the mirror image, and identifies with it
as a superior self. It is at this level, according to the theory, that one develops the
capacity for empathy, for the individual is able to “see” him/herself as the other. The
Symbolic stage, where through language the child leams to differentiate “I” from
“you.” “he,” “she,” and “it,” represents entrance into the culture itself because
(going back to Saussure) language functions as a system o f symbols reflecting the
culture.
Some theorists used psychoanalytic theory as a form o f narrative analysis,
examining how the plot elements conformed to the Oedipus complex. Examples o f
this include films like Jaws (19751 and Star W ars (19771. two films in which the
ineffective male protagonists take the places o f their symbolic fathers, Quint and Obi
Wan Kenobi, respectively, before they can function as heroes. But the more
interesting and provocative approaches concerned the processes at work in the minds
o f the spectators.
Jean Louis Baudry was among the first to theorize about the movie-going
experience, likening the act o f film viewing to that o f dreaming. He saw film as a
projection o f fantasy, a way to experience repressed desires. Baudry also theorized
that film spectators experienced a temporary loss o f ego through identification with
film characters, regressing into Lacan’s Mirror phase. But even more so, Baudry
argued that identification with the cinema as apparatus also takes place. The
37
omnipotent position o f the spectator offers power, and the narrative, with its
completeness, offers unity and organization that does not exist in the real world
(1965).
Metz, the pioneer in semiotics, brought more questions to the fore when he
considered the viewer’s desire for the absent object, since cinema presents figures
made only o f light and shadow. Metz argues that the image one sees is not a
reflection in the mirror, but one’s own likeness. Pleasure for the spectator is
obtained not through regression, but through scopophilia, pleasure in looking, and
voyeurism, gratification in looking from a hidden vantage point, re-enacting Freud’s
Primal Scene in which the child witnesses the sexual relations between his parents,
but can not participate (1975).
Marxist/Ideological Approaches
Like that o f psychoanalysis, the ideological approach to film also explores the
relation o f the viewer to the text, but doing so to expose the medium’s ability to
reinforce, reproduce, and sometimes challenge social relations o f inequality. Linked
to Marxism, it refers to the interpellation o f the individual to the material culture and
the values and beliefs o f the ruling class. The dominant position of the ruling class
regulates the production and distribution o f ideas - and so the ideas o f the ruling class
become the ideas o f the society. According to the base/superstructure model o f
classic Marxism, the economic base of a society determines its superstructure -
politics, laws, education, religion, and the culture industries (mass media).
According to theorists in the tradition o f the Frankfurt School6, film, like other forms
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o f mass media, embodies the particular ideology o f the status quo. Film aids in the
production o f false consciousness, where the subordinate classes participate in their
own subjugation by adopting the ideologies o f the ruling class. The Frankfurt
School’s method o f analysis is a valuable one, revealing the class contradictions
inherent in capitalist society. Our legal system is a good illustration, for crimes
involving assaults on individuals are often treated less severely than those o f
property, and people o f monetary means are favored throughout the judicial process.
The Hollywood film industry is another, because its primary commitment to
maximizing profits while minimizing costs results in a style that supports narratives
that fail to challenge the dominant ideologies. We can see this in numerous
Hollywood releases, such as the 1988 drama directed by Jonathan Kaplan The
Accused, a film touted as progressive, that ultimately remains a film in support o f
patriarchy.
This message picture was marketed as a film critiquing the culture’s attitudes
about rape. The film ’s tagline —The first scream was for help. The second one was
for justice —speaks to the way the film attempts to address sexual assault as a crime
o f misogyny and the failure o f the judicial system to address it. Sarah Tobias, played
by Jodie Foster, is a young woman who, gang-raped in a bar, tries to seek justice in
court, but is deemed an unsuitable witness because o f her lifestyle. Instead o f
allowing Tobias to take the stand, prosecutor Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis)
agrees to a plea bargain with the rapists, reducing their charges to reckless
endangerment. Angered and betrayed, Tobias confronts Murphy, who decides to
39
prosecute the onlookers for criminal solicitation, thereby having the records state that
a rape had occurred. Sarah Tobias gets her day in court and is given the opportunity
to testify. Her testimony, given in a riveting performance by Foster7 is the
centerpiece o f the courtroom drama. Tobias finding her voice, however, it is
undermined by that o f Kenneth Joyce (Bemie Coulson), a college student who
witnessed the assault. When Joyce takes the stand, his account is given narrative
precedence because it drives a lengthy flashback where we witness the rape from his
perspective, not Tobias’. His gaze is further strengthened by the use o f his voice
over to describe the attack. His very presence as a witness renders Tobias’ statement
less important, because the case requires the testimony o f a man to get the others
convicted. This is very similar to the ways racism is handled in Hollywood films, as
I discuss in the next chapter.
Though the concept o f false consciousness rings true in many
circumstances8, it is a subject o f consternation because it denies oppressed classes
any agency, as if they are complete dupes o f the system. Antonio Gramsci addressed
the problem o f false consciousness, explaining that the status quo is not always
maintained by direct coercion, but by the process o f hegemony. According to
Gramsci, the status quo represents a power bloc, and there are numerous subaltern
groups with respective ideologies that vie for dominance. The status quo must
therefore continually work to sustain itself, seeking the consent o f the subcultures
through various means, among them co-optation and commodification.
(1971). As cultural artifacts, the products o f the culture industries, like the society
40
itself, are also sites o f ideological struggle, and as Stuart H all’s “Encoding and
Decoding” (1980) demonstrates, are capable o f producing a number o f different
meanings. Hall effectively redesigned the old Shannon and Weaver
“sender/receiver” model o f the communication process.
The basic view o f communication is that it is an activity central to all cultures
in which messages are exchanged. It involves the sending o f a message as efficiently
and accurately as possible for the avoidance o f miscommunication. A sender, or
source, chooses a medium, sends the message though a channel, to the receiver.
Sender - - - - - - - Channel-* - - - - - - Receiver
Hall’s approach sees communication as the production and exchange not of
messages, but o f meaning...how people interact with the message to produce
meaning. There is no possibility for miscommunication to occur, for the relationship
is not between the sender and receiver, but between the receiver and the text.
Though it is extremely important to consider the relations o f production and the
frameworks o f knowledge used to produce (encode) the text, it is equally important
to consider the same aspects in the reception o f the text (decode). Viewers will not
only read the codes o f the text, but combine it with other signs to come up with
alternate or different meanings than that o f other readers. Hall defines three
hypothetical positions: the dominant-hegemonic position, when the viewer operates
within the dominant code; the negotiated position, when the viewer acknowledges
the dominant codes, while at the same time exceptions to the rule; and the
oppositional position, where the “preferred code is re-totalized in a alternative
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framework o f reference” (137). Thus, subcultural groups are not always subjected to
the process o f false consciousness. So in viewing the heterosexual Hollywood texts,
lesbians are able to find pleasure and read against the grain and gay men to see the
films as relevant to their lives (Whitaker 1985, Arbuthnot & Seneca 1990, and Dyer
1986). And a film like 1992's The Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston and Kevin
Costner, full o f racist precepts, celebrated by Black women because it showed that a
Black woman’s life was important and worth saving.
Another critique o f the Frankfurt tradition involved its reliance on orthodox
Marxism’s base/superstructure model. The Marxist theorists o f the Birmingham
tradition9 questioned the premise that means o f production as the sole determinant o f
culture. Louis Althusser’s theory o f social formation, published in his essay
“Ideology and the State Apparatus” resolved the problem by acknowledging class as
significant in the social order, but adding that other powerful hierarchies existed,
working separately, but in collusion with the economic structure. Each distinct with
its own history and mode o f operation, these institutions function autonomously, but
are mutually dependent (1971). Althusser’s theory made it possible, then, to use the
Marxist approach to interrogate issues o f class, race, gender, sexuality, age, and other
relations o f power.
By combining the three methods o f semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism,
film scholars could investigate film form and its relation to ideology in ways
previously not considered. One o f the most significant is Laura Mulvey’s path-
breaking essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” perhaps the most re-printed
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article in the history o f film scholarship. Mulvey syncretized aspects o f the
psychoanalysis and semiotics, linking for the first time these theories with feminist
analysis.
In her examination o f Hollywood texts, Mulvey reveals the ways in which the
particular narrative and structural form o f mainstream film makes use o f sexual
difference to enhance the erotic spectacle for the male viewer. The medium makes o f
social convention o f to-be-looked-at-ness, the objectification o f women as erotic
spectacle with men as the subject and bearer o f the active look. This is represented
in film by three gazes o f the protagonists, the gaze o f the film audience, and the gaze
o f the camera. Because the main characters tend to be male, and the film sutures the
audience into a position o f identification aligned with the protagonist, the camera
also takes his perspective, for all intents and purposes, all three gazes are male.
Though all three are separate, they work together to greater effect because “as the
spectator identitfies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that o f
his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls
events coincides with the active power o f the erotic look, both giving a satisfying
sense o f omnipotence” (1990, 34). But more than just a spectacle for visual pleasure,
the woman also represents a castration threat, a threat to power, so she must be
neutralized. This occurs in one o f two ways - by devaluing, punishing, or saving o f
the guilty woman, or by fetishization. Mulvey uses illustrative examples from
Sternberg’s work featuring Marlene Dietrich and the films o f Alfred Hitchcock.
Arguing that traditional film form is a patriarchal one, Mulvey calls for a new film
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form, one that refuses visual pleasure based on sexual difference.
Many scholars applied Baudry’s notion o f film as fantasy, relating it to
ideology by examining the construction o f social taboos like interracial romance,
class-mixing, and violence in film (Marchetti 1993, Tasker 1993, and Wartenberg
1999). One o f the most revealing trends o f contemporary film studies has been the
application o f these theories to genre study. Because genres are formulaic, with
popularity linked to specific historical moments, scholars are able to discern the ways
in which particular genres meet the emotional, psychological, and ideological needs
o f their audiences. Robin Wood for example, explains how certain surplus desires
concerning race, homosexuality, and female sexual desire are released from the
collective unconscious in the American horror genre. Released from our collective
unconscious as monstrous entities threatening society, we are given the opportunity
to enjoy these repressed desires without punishment, at least for a while, until they
are defeated and put back in their proper places (1979).
As higher education and academic presses have become more inclusionary,
these approaches are increasingly being utilized by scholars o f color and others to
address issues o f race and postcoloniality. Manthia Diawara (1988) complicated
Mulvey’s theory o f visual pleasure when he asked questions o f identification in the
mind o f Black spectators: What happens when Black viewers watch films featuring
White protagonists? Do Black viewers assume a White subjectivity when viewing
and identifying with White protagonists? He concludes that differences o f race,
gender, and sexuality provide contexts for different readings o f the same film, and
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the Black spectators may, in fact, resist spectatorship refusing the position offered by
the text. Gladstone Yearwood also interrogates issues o f form and reception in his
essay ‘Tow ards a Theory o f a Black Cinema Aesthetic,” which debunks traditional
definitions o f Black cinema. Rejecting both iconic and indexical notions, Yearwood
argues that Black film must emanate “from an essential cultural matrix deriving from
a collective black socio-cultural and historical experience and uses black expressive
traditions as a means through which artistic languages are mediated” (1982, 70). As
an oppositional cinema, Black films should, according to Yearwood, transform the
production process, refuse the paradigm o f the Hollywood narrative, and set up its
own terms o f exchange within the consumer system. Stam and Shohat’s award
winning Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) directly confronts film studies’ obsession
with Hollywood film, providing textual analysis o f films from the neglected cinemas
o f Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States to reveal the continuing history
Eurocentric colonialism and the counter-discourses in alternative cinemas. In her
study on ethnographic cinema, Fatimah Tobing Roni also critiques colonialism and
racism, noting the intersecting practices o f anthropology, ethnographic film, and
popular culture in the construction o f the primitive Other (1996).
ID. Narrative Structure and Ideology
Because film is used first and foremost as a storytelling medium, it is
important to deconstruct the narrative and analyze its relation to form. Even those
films that do not function as fictional entertainment, such as documentary,
educational non-fiction, and much o f the avant garde, use narrative form to
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communicate to their audiences. Though one can go all the way back to Aristotle
and the Poetics, the beginning o f modem narrative theory is attributed to the
pioneering work o f Vladmimir Propp and his examination o f Russian folktales
(1970). His study revealed conventions o f the narrative structure, most importantly
the types o f characters (hero, helper, villain, donor, dispatcher, false hero, princess,
and her father) and their functions within the narrative. This descriptive analysis
provided a methodology for identifying conventions o f narrative form, and, when
merged with cultural concerns, can be used to reveal ideological underpinnings
attached to character and function. For example, in the 1995 action film Bad Bovs.
which featured hip-hop artist turned actor Will Smith and comedian Martin
Lawrence as police detectives. The murder o f the most significant Black female
character, played by Anna Thompson (donor), sets the plot in motion; the two Black
law officers (heroes) must protect a material witness(princess), played by Tea Leoni.
This action comedy powerfully represents what Stam and Shohat identify as one of
the characteristics o f racism - the devaluation o f life (1994). Here we have once
again White womanhood valued over that o f the Black woman, who, as a prostitute,
is linked to unlawful and immoral sexuality.
Tzvetan Todorov was another important early structuralist who examined the
construction o f narrative. His definition o f narrative, which we can certainly see
within the mainstream film, presents a state o f affairs that are violated and the set
right (1977). His work on speculative fiction, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
to a Literary Genre, was one o f the first to focus on discourse using a semiotic
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approach. Continuing in this tradition was John Cawelti, who also concentrated his
studies on narrative and genre, focusing on works previously ignored by literary
scholars - the Western, melodrama, and detective stories. His book, Adventure.
Mystery, and Romance identified the formulas of the texts, linking them to the
psychological and cultural attitudes o f their respective periods and the pleasures
these genres afford their audiences (1975). These texts provided a good model for
the study o f film genres, as demonstrated by the work o f many film scholars such as
Will Wright, who wrote extensively on the Western, and Thomas Elsaesser, author o f
the definitive essay melodrama (1976,1972).
Metz’s pioneering application o f semiology to film, noted earlier, also
concerned issues o f narrative. His theory o f the grande syntagmatique highlights and
names the range o f narrative patterns (syntagams) into which fiction films can be
divided at the level o f scenes and sequences. David Bordwell built on the approach,
introducing a study o f narrative structure in Hollywood films that revealed the
normalized presentation o f story events and its relations to image composition and
form (1985). Bordwell’s seminal study o f what he terms “classical Hollywood
narrative style,” refers not to films produced by studios in southern California, but to
the particular approach to film narrative that has become the prevailing film language
around the world, defining what a “normal” feature film is. It is called the classical
Hollywood narrative style because it was conventionalized by the Hollywood
industry, itself standardized, by 1915. According to Bordwell, the classical
Hollywood narrative is characterized by the following (1985):
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1. Psychologically defined individual characters who struggle to
solve a clear-cut problem or to attain a specific goal.
2. The most specified character is the protagonist, who becomes the
causal agent, the target o f any narrational restriction, and the
chief object o f audience identification.
3. A counter-force o r opposition to the protagonist’s goal is introduced and
conflict is created.
4. Causality is the prime unifying principle. Time is subordinated to the
cause and effect chain o f events, omitting significant durations in order
to only show the events o f causal importance. Spacial configurations are
also motivated by causality. (Props and mise en scene relate to the needs
o f the story).
5. The causal structure is a dual one, with two plot lines. One involves
romance and the other relates to another sphere - work, war, a mission or
quest, or other personal relationships. Each plot line possesses a goal,
obstacles, and a climax. One may conclude before the other, but most often
the two lines coincide at the climax: resolving one triggers the resolution of
the other.
6. The narrative films display a strong sense o f closure. The initial state of
affairs that was violated is set right. The majority o f films end with the
cliche happy ending.
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7. Classical narration tends to be omniscient. It knows more than any or
all characters. It conceals relatively little, and seldom acknowledges its own
address to the audience.
This narrative structure, in its apparent neutral telling o f stories, is not
without ideological concerns, for inherent within its particulars are a number of
assumptions and values. It is because o f classical Hollywood narrative as the
dominant film form against which all others are measured, accepted as the norm, that
they are considered particularly dangerous. As Ray argues, “artistic conventions are
the equivalent o f myth...representations that transform the historical and man-made
into the timeless and natural” (1985, 14). The emphasis on the individual as causal
agent relieves societal institutions and complex social circumstances from
culpability. Social problem films using the classical Hollywood narrative style
construct in their diegesis not a culture o f misogyny, homophobia, racism, or
xenophobia but oppression manifested solely in the form o f violence committed by a
few sick individuals, usually easily identified by stereotyped codes as working class.
Sergei Eisenstein avoided this by presenting not a single protagonist but a
protagonist o f the masses. In his films, re-interpretations o f historical events o f the
Revolution, goals were no longer those o f the isolated hero but those o f the collective
and viewers could, at least theoretically, see themselves as part o f the massive social
changes sweeping the nation. Obstacles presented are not isolated, uncommon
occurrences, but wider social issues. We can also see this in Jacque Tati’s Modernist
masterpiece Playtime (1967), where the regimentation o f modem life is presented in
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a form that rejects the regimentation o f the Hollywood formula. Julie Dash uses a
similar strategy in the hypnotic Daughters o f the Dust (1991) where time is not
linear. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously, and composition presents a
social space not for a protagonist, but for the supportive network o f an extended
family.
The classical Hollywood narrative structure, with its depiction o f romance,
presumes and values heterosexuality; with its insistence on a conclusion, reduces
complex issues so that they can be solved quickly and happily; and through the type
o f goals usually sought after, serves to reinforce capitalistic values and consumer
consumption. All o f this is supported through another set o f conventions - the use
cinematic elements (lighting, composition, mise en scene, sound, and editing).
Because in classical Hollywood narrative the organizing principle o f the film
is the story, and all the cinematic elements must function to highlight the narrative
conventions pointed out by Bordwell. Music is commonly used to evoke particular
emotional responses to events in the narrative. The focus on the individual creates a
reliance on the use o f close ups. The marketing tool o f the star system and particular
ideas regarding glamour and beauty are related to the use o f three-point lighting.
And the film style also works to mask its own construction.
It was the work o f semioticians like Daniel Dayan, in his seminal essay “The
Tutor Code o f Classical Cinema,” that linked the conventions o f Hollywood film
form to structures o f oppression, noting that if narrative film is to transmit its
ideologies successfully, it must hide its operations, and it does so by a process o f
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naturalization, presenting itself “as a product without a producer, a discourse without
an origin...classical cinema establishes itself as the ventriloquist o f ideology” (1976,
447).
Those formal conventions used to occlude the production process include:
subjects arranged in the frame to avoid direct gazes into the camera to maintain the
imaginary fourth wall, the omniscient point o f view; and continuity editing. This
approach to post-production, aptly referred to as invisible editing, joins shots and
ultimately scenes in a style not meant to be noticed by the audience. It involves use
o f eyeline matches, matched action, and the 180° rule, which maintains screen
direction.
The pemiciousness o f the classical Hollywood narrative derives from its
ability to seem as if it tells itself, hence rendering its ideologies natural. The intense
identification it induces in the spectators, putting their consciousness to sleep. This is
compounded by the fact that motion pictures are considered as entertainment
products rather than ideological tools. A fictional narrative, Illusions functions very
differently, using mimesis, negation, and subversion of the classical Hollywood
narrative form to highlight the artificiality o f cinema and to challenge the status
quo’s attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality.
Because films and videos written and directed by Black women operate as
correctives to the racism and sexism o f mainstream film and television, it is not
surprising to see condemnatory critiques o f the media and popular culture within
their work. Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982) interrogates
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pornography and advertising, while Kathe Sandler’s A Question o f Color (1992)
critiques the beauty images in magazines marketed toward women. Ayoka
Chenzira’s Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People (1984), discussed in chapter
four, comments on the media in general, and television advertising specifically. In
No Justice No Peace. Black Male ImMEDLAte (1991), analyzed in chapter five,
director Portia Cobb confronts the television news industry. Extra Change (1987) by
Carmen Coustaut reveals how the star system and beauty ideals o f popular culture
affect the self-esteem o f girls and young women. Debra Robinson, in I Be Done Was
Is (1983), examines the exclusionary practices of television that hamper the careers
o f Black stand-up comediennes. Many productions target the film industry, such as
Saundra Sharpe’s experimental film Back Inside Herself (1984), a sort o f cine-poem
that comments on “Hollyweird’s” construction of Black female cultural identity,
while others laud the work o f Black filmmakers previously ignored: Pearl Bowser’s
documentary about early Black directors o f race films, Midnight Ramble (1994);
Creating a Different Image: Portrait o f Alile Sharon Larkin (1989) directed by O.
Funmilayo Makarah, and The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash (1992) by Yvonne
Welbon, whose current work in progress, Sisters o f the Cinema explores the history
o f Black American Women filmmakers. Another recurring m otif is to feature scenes
about the process o f filmmaking itself - the feature film directed by Kathleen Collins,
Losing Ground (1982), From Rags to Reality by Joy Shannon, Patricia Hilliard’s I
Remain (1989) and the short I will discuss in detail, Illusions. Collectively these
films function to challenge notions o f the mass media industries and their histories -
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taking them to task for their depictions and hiring practices, celebrating the work o f
directors whose artistry has been ignored by scholars and popular critics,
demystifying the process o f filmmaking, and validating the work o f the Black
women directors themselves. In both narrative and form, the films about filmmaking
and those containing “films within the films” offer self-reflexivity.
More than just a type o f self-consciousness or self-reference, to be self-
reflexive requires, as Jay Ruby describes, “to structure the product [film] in such a
way that the audience assumes the producer, the process o f the making, and the
product are a coherent whole...being reflexive means that the producer deliberately
reveals to his audience the underlying epistemological assumptions that caused him
to formulate a set o f questions in a certain way, to seek answers to those questions in
a particular way, and finally to present his findings in a particular way” (1988, 65).
Self-reflexive films call attention to themselves as films, breaking the audiences’
hypnotic engagement with the narrative to highlight film as a construction. As a
visual anthropologist, Ruby sees self-reflexivity as a political obligation, especially
for documentary filmmakers, whose work is often received as unbiased, neutral, and
objective. Black filmmaker Michelle Parkerson agrees, and deliberately constructs
her documentaries with self-reflexive elements to remind the audience that the
narratives in her work are not natural, that her films are constructed, present an
argument, and emerge from the consciousness and labor o f an individual with a
particular social-cultural background and ideology (1989).
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Some o f the characteristics o f a self-reflexive stance include:
1. Direct address, which breaks the fourth wall, acknowledges the presence
o f the audience and the existence o f the film and its characters as object o f
the gaze
2. Intertextuality, the presence o f two or more intersecting texts (films
within films)
3. Allusion, references to other films,such as the famous line uttered
by Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver
(1976), “You talkin’ to me?!,” drawn from the classic Western Shane
directed by George Stevens in 1953, where the protagonist played by
Alan Ladd inquires o f his tormentors, “You speakin’ to me?”
4. Revealing institutional practices involved in production and/or exposing
the mechanical apparatus
5. The use o f titles and intertitles, which call attention to the existence o f
a narrator
6. Formalist styles that call attention to mediation (slow and fast motion,
extreme angles, expressive lighting and sound).
7. Non-linear narrative progression, often confusing, that forces the viewer
to be an active rather than passive, as in Haile Gerima’s Bush Mamma
(1976).
Released in 1982, Julie Dash’s critically acclaimed Illusions is such a film.
Set in 1942, the narrative focuses on the character o f Mignon Dupree (Lonette
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McKee), an executive for National Film Studios in Hollywood. Taking advantage of
her position within the corporation, Dupree tries to use her power to force changes in
the feature films o f National Studios, suggesting to the studio head, C.J. Forrester
(Jack Radar) that they make films about the average person, “giving the public
situations and characters that they can recognize as a part o f their own lives.” When
this idea is disregarded, she suggests a film based in reality, about Code Talkers,
Native Americans serving in the U.S.armed forces who send and receive sensitive
messages in their indigenous languages so that Axis spies can not decipher them.
But just as class bias causes her first suggestion to be rejected, Eurocentrism causes
this proposal to fail as well.
Dupree is sexually harassed throughout the day by Lt. Robert Bedsford, who
has been assigned to National Studios to facilitate the studio’s contribution to the war
effort. She successfully rebuffs him and is then assigned a repair job. The Christmas
release, a musical featuring the studio’s biggest star, Lila Grant (Gaye Kruger), is set
back by technical problems. In one o f the musical numbers, synchronization is lost
and they can’t reshoot because Grant is with the U.S.O. entertaining troops. Ester
Jeeter, the young Black woman who recorded the song for the master tapes, is
brought in to re-record her vocals, this time matching her voice with the visuals,
rather than the usual practice, which is the other way around. Dupree oversees the
process, and in a conversation with Jeeter it is revealed that Dupree is a Black
woman passing for White. Lt. Bedsford discovers this secret when he violates
Dupree’s privacy, snooping in her office and finding a love letter written by her
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husband serving overseas. Because the accompanying picture is o f an all-Black
regiment, he assumes that she too is Black. An interesting point about the discovery
is that he deduces that she is Black by association. Her distanced association with
her co-workers could have been attributed not to passing, but by an attempt to hide
an illicit affair. She could have actually been a White woman with a Black lover.
Though, as described in this synopsis, the storyline appears to be simplistic and
straightforward, the film’s narrative, as well as its presentation, is a highly complex
and multi-layered commentary on the nature o f reality and its representation.
Illusions reveals the fallacies o f many concepts accepted as “truth” by the majority of
the population - notions o f race, gender, and the nature o f film.
It is important when discussing race to concern oneself not only with what
race is, but how it is used. Race is a social construct for the cultivation o f social
groupings, not a classification o f science. According to anthropologists Jolly and
Plog (1987), “There is no evidence, and no good theoretical reason for believing that
‘pure races’ ever existed in Europe or elsewhere” (474). Biologists and geneticists
have found that more variation exists within racial groups rather than across them.
Conversely, what is used to define groups is the phenotype, characteristics o f
appearance based on visible traits- eye and hair color, skin pigmentation, hair texture,
facial features. Race and its corollary discriminatory practices are contradictory,
unsustainable over international boundaries. For example, in South Africa persons
o f Chinese descent are considered Colored while those o f Japanese descent are
considered White. In the United States, in accordance to the one-drop rule, a person
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with any Black ancestry is considered Black while in other countries he or she may
not be. People from the countries o f Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India are considered
Asian in the United States, but Black in England. Since the diversity o f the human
population can not be defined in this manner, and more genetic variations exist
within racial groups rather than across them, what then is the purpose o f racial
designations?
According to the Marxist view, the classification o f people by race functions
as an element o f capitalistic societies. Because capitalism functions on the
subjugation o f particular groups and is sustained by the creation o f both unemployed
and working classes, it is necessary to designate certain people within defined social
positions in order to insure the continuity o f the ruling classes. The argument can be
furthered by noting the correlation between the growth o f capitalist economics and
the development o f racial theory. In a society such as that o f the United States,
where racism is an inherent and intransigent aspect of the society, the concept o f race
is made even more insidious because o f the behaviors ascribed to each racial
classification and the related discriminatory practices.
For Black Americans, as discussed earlier, race connotes the artificially
constructed behavior patterns attributed to the entire grouping - inferior intelligence,
uninhibited sexual prowess, criminality, a propensity for violence, and lack o f a work
ethic. Mignon Dupree’s rise to power and her demonstrated competence on the job
dispels those myths, as well as those that work to keep women relegated to the
domestic sphere. Concepts o f race as depicted in Illusions are further complicated by
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the fact that Dupree is passing.
Passing, a term originally applied only to Blacks, involves the appropriation
o f a White identity in order to transgress social barriers and obtain opportunities not
socially sanctioned. More than ju st an act for personal gain, passing can also ensure
the basic human rights o f security o f person and the right to life. The access to more
life chances through passing are not accomplished without great personal cost,
however, for it requires a separation and loss o f loyalty to family, friends, and whole
communities. Passing itself calls into question the basic notions o f race, revealing it
not as natural, but as performance. If a Black person can pass for White, effacing the
boundary separating the races, how then does one tell the difference? How then does
one define Whiteness? Dash powerfully discloses the illusionary notion of race and
does so by playing on the audience’s assumptions.
Just as everyone in our culture is assumed to be heterosexual, those who
appear to be White are assumed to be White. Using restrictive narration, Dash does
not let us in on Dupree’s secret, and we learn it when the characters do, or rather,
when it is inferred in the last scene before Dupree’s confrontation with the
Lieutenant. After the vocal recording has finished, and appropriate payment has
been negotiated for Jeeter, the two women, sitting in the office sharing coffee:
JEETER. Do you pretend when you’re with them, or can you just
be yourself? Oh don’t worry, they can’t tell like we can.
DUPREE. No, they can’t, can they?
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JEETER. I have to meet my mother outside the studio. She’s always there
after my performances...I guess it makes me feel good too, to
know that she’ll be there. Thanks again for everything.
DUPREE. No, thank you, Miss Jeeter...take care o f yourself.
LOUISE, (secretary - to Dupree): Honey, you sure are good with them...
I just never know what to say to them.
DUPREE. It’s very simple, Louise. Just speak to them as you would speak
to me.
By restricting the information and allowing the audience to operate, like the
characters, on the assumption o f Whiteness, Dash forces us to interrogate our
participation in the normalization o f Whiteness. The exchange brings to the fore the
ability o f Black Americans to read cultural nuances largely ignored and/or unknown
by White Americans, whose privilege allows them to exist without the double
consciousness or twoness as described by DuBois (1989, 5), experienced by people
o f color in the United States. Dupree’s remark to the secretary Louise, delivered
quite caustically, speaks to the common humanity Black people share with Whites
and the respect and politeness they are due. It also serves to demonstrate a
significant difference between the passing o f Dupree and passing as represented in
mainstream Hollywood texts like Imitation o f Life, both the 1934 and 1959 versions,
and Pinkv (1949).
In these films, the tragic mulatto, usually played by a White actress, strives to
“avoid the shame o f Blackness” by passing as White. Despite the fact that they
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would be considered Black by the wider culture, these mulattoes suffer crippling
identity crises. Cutting themselves o ff from their families and communities,
characters like Imitation o f Life’s Peola and Pinky’s Patricia/Pinky, seek individual
opportunity. Mignon Dupree shares none o f these characteristics. She maintains her
ties to the Black community, as indicated in a telephone conversation she shares with
her mother, is married to a Black soldier, exhibits none o f the psychoses afflicting
her Hollywood counterparts, and did not actively seek to deceive her employers. The
executives at National Studios never questioned her race and she “just didn’t happen
to mention it, either.”
Though Dupree certainly benefits from the misplaced assumption, she uses
her position to try to effect changes, both in the industry and in the culture at large.
Recognizing the tremendous power o f film’s influence, she is also aware o f the
traditional practices o f the industry whose cut-and-paste methods as she argues,
“have eliminated my history, my participation in this country.” Her push to have a
film produced based on the Native American marines demonstrates a more expansive
effort to seek redress not only for Black Americans, but for all oppressed peoples o f
color, and her fight to secure a fair wage for Ester Jeeter’s labor attempts to correct
the continuing wage discrimination that still occurs today.
It is clear to see that the narrative provides a scathing critique o f Hollywood
by reclaiming and re-constructing the stereotype o f the mulatto, citing the need for a
larger minority presence in executive positions, and calling attention to the lack o f
films about people o f color produced by the industry. But it goes even further.
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Dash establishes her contestation with the mainstream motion picture
industry magnificently with the opening shot, the image o f Hollywood’s most
revered and sought after symbol - the Oscar. This statuette, a signifier o f artistry
and achievement in the motion picture arts, means something else entirely for
communities o f color: exclusion. In the 72 year history o f the award, the Academy
o f Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has bestowed the honor o f the Academy Award
to only five Black Americans; Hattie McDaniel for her role as a mammy in Gone
with the W ind (1939), Denzel Washington for Glory (1989), Whoopi Goldberg for
Ghost (1990), and Cuba Gooding, Jr. for Jerry Maguire (1977) - all as supporting
actors. Sidney Poitier was awarded for Lilies of die Field (1963). He is to date the
only Black actor to win in a leading role. No Black actress has ever won for a leading
role, no Black director has ever been recognized, no Black American has been
recognized for technical achievement, and no Black-themed film has won Best
Picture. But back to Illusions...
As the camera dollies in toward the rotating trophy, gleaming within a void o f
blackness, we hear Dupree in a voice-over, quoting from Richard Wright’s Shadow
and Act. ‘T o direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal
with action, image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act,
and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion” (276). It is an extremely
apt citation for Illusions, a self-reflexive film about film that challenges mainstream
signifying practices, for it highlights very effectively the relations between film and
reality. Though Dash omits the rest o f Wright’s paragraph, which speaks to the
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cultural contexts and uses o f stereotypes:
....psychologically and ethically these negative images constitute
justifications for all those acts, legal, emotional, economic, and political
which we label Jim Crow. The anti Negro image is thus a ritual object
o f which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator. Its role
has been that o f justifying the widely held myth o f Negro unhumanness
and inferiority by offering entertaining rituals through which that myth
could be reaffirmed. (276)
The portion she chooses to use is important because it explains that the target of her
critique is not Hollywood products, but Hollywood practices. And in the most noted
scene o f the film, the post-dubbing sequence, Dash reveals the process that exploits
Black labor and talent for White profit and White notoriety.
This complex sequence is the most highly self-reflexive moment o f Illusions.
for it is here that we see the process o f filmmaking, experience a film within the film,
and as spectators are forced to consider the relation o f Dash’s film to reality. It takes
place on a sound-stage, and Dash continually crosscuts between the control booth,
where Dupree and two White male engineers oversee the recording session; Ester
Jeeter, standing before a microphone into which she sings, and the movie screen on
to which the musical number in need o f post-syncronization is projected.
The scenes from the National Studio’s production represent Hollywood
glamour at its height and the desirous power o f bourgeois Whiteness. In one
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number, Lila, dressed in an evening gown, singing (in fact lip-synching) and cavorts
with two tuxedo-wearing male dancers. In another, the scene that has lost sync
sound, Lila is in an opulently furnished apartment, reclining on a plush white sofa,
seductively caressing a rose while mouthing the love song previously recorded by
Jeeter. Dash cuts back and forth across the spaces o f the screen, the engineer’s both,
and Jeeter, at times giving the projected image a full frame, so that we are, in fact,
watching that film in addition to the one containing it. As Kaplan describes, the
most complex image here is the long shot, done as a long take, that shows a triple
image o f an engineer (whose image is also reflected in the glass that separates the
booth from the larger room) on the edge o f the frame, the projection screen with Lila
in the middle, and Jeeter singing to the image on the other end o f the frame. We
watch the recording process and as Kaplan states, “the strategy o f not cutting but
preserving the three spaces intact dramatizes the shocking fact o f the White star’s
voice being that o f a Black woman, whose image is erased, the role o f the male
technicians producing this lie, and the contradiction o f the technicians (seeing the
reflection) getting caught up in the song...in addition, the confused image with
different faces and figures overlapping suggest the constructed nature o f the positions
everyone is made to assume by the patriarchal politics o f the typical Hollywood
studio and the automatic racism o f this White institution” (1997, 228). All of this is
further complicated by the fact that the voice that emanated from Ester Jeeter is not
that o f Rosanne Katon, the actress who plays her, but the voice o f the great jazz
vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Moreover, while Dupree, the studio exec, and the
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technicians discuss the syncronization problem in the booth, they go out o f sync! It
is important that Dash, given her argument, center this film on issues o f syncronized
sound, because, since its introduction, it has become significant in the recreation o f
reality, and in only one scene, through a facile use o f self-reflexive form, she is able
to expose the artificiality of Hollywood film, as well as the artificiality o f her own.
Another concern I would like to raise in this analysis is the setting o f the film.
Surely, the issues Dash raises are relevant to every era in the history o f film, so why
is the film set in 1942, shot in black and white, using lighting, costume, and
composition to evoke the feel and glamour o f Golden Age Hollywood? And why
use a musical in the dubbing scene?
For film scholars and fans alike, classical Hollywood remains the
predominant site o f fascination. During this period, from 1930 to 1949, an oligarchy
controlled every aspect o f the industry—production, distribution, and exhibition -
and enjoyed its greatest economic success and most powerful ideological sway. As
Gomery explains, eight companies consisting o f the five majors - Paramount, Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., RKO; and three minors -
Universal, Columbia, and United Artists, dominated entertainment business on an
international scale (1986). Though, as Schatz states, “the vertically integrated majors
saw radical changes during the war, owing primarily to the volatile market conditions
and the increased importance and clout o f producers and top talent,” he continues,
“World War II was indeed the best o f times financially for the movie industry. The
prewar defense buildup initiated the economic upturn, with the Big Eight’s combined
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profits surging from about $20 million in 1940 to $35 million in 1941. Those figures
were far surpassed during the war: The Big Eight’s combined profits neared $50
million in 1942 and then exceeded even pre-Depression totals, holding a sustained
peak o f some $60 million in each o f the next three years” (1997, 157). The ubiquity
o f Hollywood films during this period was not lost on the government, and the
industry was integrated quite handily in support o f the war effort. In fact, Hollywood
responded vigorously and with great fervor. Involvement included the use o f noted
directors (among them John Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, William Wyler, and
George Stevens) in the production o f training films, newsreels, and documentaries.
Feature films reflecting the government’s political and military agenda were
released. Motion picture stars entertained troops at home and abroad, and even
served in the armed forces (including James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Alan Ladd, and
Robert Taylor). Films were shipped overseas to entertain the troops, often released
to them months before premiering in the United States. And as film started to reflect
the massive social changes brought on by the war, there were new hopes for Black
Americans, both within the film industry and in the country at large.
The United States involvement in WWII, a war waged in three theaters,
required total engagement, and the war could not be fought without the patriotic
participation o f Black Americans, both overseas and on the home front. America
was faced with an ideological contradiction, for the war was presented as a battle
against fascism, tyranny, ethnic imperialism, and ethnic genocide. As Franklin and
Moss state, it was a time in which the United States “would have to deal more justly
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with all its people” (1988, 399). The Hollywood studios reacted to the shifts in racial
relations by increasing the roles o f Black actors in their productions. Though still
serving only in supportive positions, their characters were given more depth and
humanity in films like In This Our Life (1942) and Sahara (1943). Dash set her film
during this period, because it represents a time o f great possibilities for the industry.
During the war, with its grand economic and political power, Hollywood had the
opportunity to affect real change in the racial hegemony, but concerns o f profit over
people left those possibilities unrealized. It also presents, very directly, the
contributions Black Americans made to the industry that have been rendered
invisible. In fact, I would argue that, were it not for the contribution o f Black
Americans, the consolidation o f the studio system would not have occurred as it did
during the transformation of film from silent to synchronized sound.
The coming o f sound is without a doubt the most sweeping change in the
history o f American cinema, involving shifts in economics, aesthetics, technology,
genre, social practice, and even other forms o f popular culture. But what does this
have to do with race? In 1927 Warner Bros, released the first feature-length film that
made use o f synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer, starring vaudeville star A1 Jolson,
the most popular entertainer o f his era, whose performances drew heavily from
minstrelsy. This film, the major box-office success that inaugurated the coming of
sound, mines Black popular culture through its use o f the Black musical form jazz.
The film focuses on the character o f Jakie Rabinowitz a.k.a. Jack Robin, who rejects
his family tradition by choosing to be a jazz singer rather than a cantor. Essentially,
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jazz, as used here, is co-opted by ethnic Whites, in this case Jews, and performed in
blackface so that they can prove that they are, in fact, not Black, but White.
The coming o f sound brought with it the emergence o f two new film genres
that could capitalize on the newly innovated technology: the gangster film, with its
reliance on the sounds o f gunfire, criminal jargon, and squealing tires, and the
musical, which drew extensively from Black popular culture. America’s fascination
with Black dialects and musical forms brought a tidal wave o f Black talent to the
cinema, m ostly in the form o f two-reelers, films that, according to Cripps, “brought
the best o f Afro-American vaudeville, vernacular dancing, and the more commercial
forms o f jazz to film” (219). The interest was so keen that the film considered the
first major sound feature, King Vidor’s Halleluiah! (1929) featured an all-Black
cast!10
The success o f the musical helped the industry through the turbulent period o f
transformation from silent to sound and even helped the industry weather the Great
Depression, as they were among the most profitable films during the time and
remained a staple genre for twenty more years. But as the genre progressed, Black
performers were eventually replaced by White stars. Blacks were erased from the
film genre based on their cultural music forms, and as Dyer states, the films “implied
that Whites are better at Black (and other) music and dance than Blacks themselves”
(1995, 31).
Julie Dash’s Illusions is a testament to the contributions, acknowledged or
not, that Black people have made to film history and to this society. Dash has
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merged the politic o f her narrative with the politics o f form, presenting for audiences
the tensions between social formation, subjectivity, and representation. Illusions.
What a fitting title for a film that discloses race, gender roles as false practices, and,
and filmmaking as one to be questioned. Like the fictional character she created,
Mignon Dupree, Dash too “wants to use the power o f the motion picture, for there
are many stories to be told....and many battles to begin,” and that battle begins with
access to the production process.
One issue Dash makes clear in the film is the impact o f Hollywood’s
exclusionary labor practices. Dupree’s presence at National Studios makes a
demonstrated impact in the film. She ensured a fair wage for Jeeter’s labor and she
works to alter the focus and content o f the studio’s productions. Over a decade alter
the release o f Illusions, the lack o f people o f color and women employed in above-
the-line positions within the industry, as producers, directors, and screenwriters,
remains a problem. In 1996 industry statistics revealed that fewer than two hundred
Blacks are members o f the Academy o f Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has
a total membership o f 5,043. Union membership is an important criteria in obtaining
work in Hollywood, yet only 2.3 percent o f the Directors Guild o f America are
Black, and only 2.6 percent o f the Writer’s Guild (Lambert, et al., 1996). These
numbers are deplorable enough, but even worse is the fact that union membership
does not equate with employment. This systematic exclusion has resulted in what
Parks describes as “White America’s romantic or vilified versions o f Black
people...images never like us o f like anyone we knew” (1995, 14) - - stereotypes, as
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discussed in chapter three. Another consequence is, as Dupree states in the film, the
“scissor and paste methods” employed by the film industry “that have eliminated my
history, my participation in this country.” The next chapter, “Documenting the
Struggle,” explores this very issue, examining the treatment o f the Civil Rights
Movement in recent Hollywood film and how Beverlyn Fray’s The Long Walk
Home breaks from the Hollywood paradigm.
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
1. The Dziga Vertov Group took it’s name from the Soviet documentary filmmaker,
discussed later in this chapter. Godard had been m aking films since 1960, but after
1968, his work released under this moniker became increasingly radical in form and
ideology, adapting many o f the techniques developed by early Soviet filmmakers.
2. This is stated by several o f award-winning directors o f photography in the 1993
documentary film Visions o f Light: The Art o f Cinematography.
3. Though still used today, the auteur approach is critiqued because o f its lack of a
theoretical base. It can not be applied widely, for it does not address those
filmmakers who do not have a consistent style or them e across a body o f work, nor
can it be applied to a filmmaker who has directed only one film.
4. Freud foregrounded men and masculinity.
5. The process for girl children differs - the Electra complex.
6. The principle figures o f the Frankfurt School o f thought include Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adomo, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin.
7. Foster won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in this film.
8. One interesting example o f this operation at work is the opposition to social
programs by destitute Whites. Wanting to keep people o f color from receiving
government aid, they reject social programs that they would benefit from.
9. The origin o f Cultural Studies and the Birmingham tradition is attributed to
scholars such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall.
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10. The demand for Black performers was so great that it drained the talent pool o f
Black production companies, leading to their demise. In addition, always fiscally
unstable, the coming o f sound also demanded expensive equipment that many could
not afford to purchase.
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CHAPTER TWO
DOCUMENTING THE STRUGGLE:
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ON FILM
The time will come, and in less then ten years, when the children
in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving
pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.
D. W. Griffith (1916)
When I first came across this quote, I was quite astounded - on one level
because it was made by the director o f the in/famous epic film The Birth o f a Nation
(1915) and on another because Griffith so accurately predicted the use o f film as an
educational tool. In this chapter, I will explore the use of film as historical text,
noting the importance o f motion pictures in the construction o f popular cultural
memory in regard to past and current race relations. It is especially apt to start this
chapter with Griffith, the so-called father o f the American cinema, because the
monumental The Birth of a Nation aided the establishment o f the conventional
Hollywood narrative structure, as Thomas Cripps describes, “in a single stroke
synthesiz[ing] all the devices and advances developed in the first generation o f
cinema” (1993,41), and because it was one o f the first mainstream films' to
concerned with issues o f race. As Snead so aptly states, The Birth o f a Nation does
not merely represent the beginning o f many cinematic codes, found here for the first
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time in any film, but also represents the culmination, refinement, and further
dissemination o f certain extra-cinematic codes concerning blacks and whites” (1994,
38).
The Birth o f a Nation, based on the 1905 novel The Clansman by Thomas
Dixon, is a melodrama that focuses on two families during the Civil War and
Reconstruction. Though the narrative is typical o f its genre, w ith its emphasis on
romance and familial relations, it is ultimately a nostalgic homage to the myth o f old
Dixieland - with Blacks in their proper places (i.e.enslaved), W hite women o f virtue
in need o f protection, noninterference o f Northerners in Southern affairs, and virile
middle-class White men in control. According to the film, the “agony the South
endured after the [Civil] War” included liquor-guzzling-fried-chicken-eating elected
Black officials trying to legalize interracial marriage, Blacks pushing Whites off
sidewalks and into the street, and carpetbaggers whose sole purpose as defined is to
organize the Black vote. The Birth o f a Nation invoked every m ajor Black
stereotype: the ambitious, scheming mulatto who makes use o f his skin privilege to
gain power, the faithful souls - Blacks happy in their subjugation, the sexualized
Jezebel, and in perhaps the film’s most cinematically exciting and tension-filled
scene; the Black rapist in pursuit o f a virginal White woman. Order is restored at the
climax o f the film, with the marauding Blacks subdued by the arrival o f the Ku Klux
Klan, described by the intertitles as “the organization that saved the South from the
anarchy o f Black rule.”
“At once a major stride for cinema and a sacrifice o f black humanity for the
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cause o f racism,"(Cripps 4 0 ) The Birth o f a Nation is also significant for its effect on
the public. Griffith’s epic inspired the first national protest against a motion picture.
Knowledge o f the film’s production created an outrage in many communities.
Black organizations such as the NAACP, supported by many community groups2,
fought diligently against the film, implementing a national campaign. Despite these
efforts, The Birth o f a Nation was an enormous success at the box office, with an
estimated 150 million viewers. It grossed more than any film made anywhere in the
world at the time o f its release, nearly forty-eight million dollars (Cook 77).
The Birth o f a Nation was not the first motion picture set in the past.
Historical films have always been a staple o f motion picture industries around the
world, and the trend has never abated. What sets it apart is its use as a historical
document. Children were encouraged to see it as a history lesson. President
W oodrow Wilson was purported to describe the film as “history written with
lightening,” and as Cripps notes, “philanthropist George Foster Peabody, Governor
o f California Hiram Johnson, critic Bum s Mantle, explorer Richard Harding David,
novelist Booth Tarkington, and social reformer Dorothea Dix accepted the movie as
an accurate rendering o f freedman who mistook license for liberty” (57).
Because, as Landy argues, “film and television productions, with their
predilection for historical narratives, are a major, perhaps even the major, circulating
source for images o f the past” (1996, 229), they are more often being employed not
as mirrors, but as windows to the past. There is a danger inherent in this use o f
dramatic feature films as historical artifacts, for they are most often interpreted on the
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level o f what Allen and Gomery describe as high school history, when “the truth o f
history is knowable on the basis o f incontrovertible facts o f history, and this truth
exists entirely separate from the interpretations o f any historian” (1985,6). Ideology
and the relations o f power, the power to create and define the past, and thus the
present, is rarely explored or questioned. The films function very much on the level
o f mythology that Barthes (1972) describes, representing culture as nature -
explaining as natural the social and political structures of society. But “narratives
involving the past are never innocent - they are instrumental in enhancing or
occluding interests in the present” (Landy 1996, 35).
On one level, historical films may provide a public arena for reengagement
with painful social crises after a passage of time that allows for reflection. The Birth
o f a Nation, for example, was produced decades after Reconstruction. More recently,
w e experienced a barrage o f films about the Vietnam War.
From 1979 to 1988, Hollywood studios released over sixty films that were
either about the W ar or veterans who fought it. Though some challenged the United
States military engagement, the most popular were those that presented Americans
with a metaphoric victory, making up for the what was commonly thought o f as
America’s first military defeat.3
On another level, historical films like The Birth of a Nation and the Vietnam
films present a concern for the present under the guise o f the past in order to deal
with issues still unresolved. As Brian Henderson demonstrated in his analysis o f
John Ford’s The Searchers ( 19S6J. the structural workings o f the narrative construct
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a tale not about miscegenation between Native Americans and Whites in the 1800's,
but about shifting racial attitudes in the 1950's between Blacks and Whites,
influenced by the Supreme Court case o f Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Thus historical films reveal more about the present than they do about the past. The
emergence o f the Vietnam films, as well as what Tasker so aptly names “musculinity
films,”4 mirrored the ideological shifts in the U.S. government and the culture at
large. Americans, restored to military might and the number one spot in the New
World Order, were able to use the time machine o f film to transport themselves back
to Vietnam and emerge victorious5.
For a more recent example o f film used as a history text, one can consider
Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List (1993). The film became the
foundation for a nationwide Holocaust education program led by Spielberg’s
production company Amblin Entertainment. Governors o f 34 states endorsed the
educational program, which, in addition to screenings for middle-school and high
school students, included a curriculum complete with study guides. In 1994
Christine Todd Whitman, the governor o f New Jersey, added fuel to a controversy on
the campus o f Kean College in Union, New Jersey. Student groups had sponsored
and scheduled a public address by a member o f the Nation of Islam, Khalid Abdul
Muhammad, whose previous speeches were characterized by many as anti-Catholic
and anti-Semitic. The governor threatened the students with punitive measures, and
even threatened to withhold state funding from the institution. Unable to legally
resort to such measures, the governor arranged several free screenings o f Spielberg’s
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film during the week o f Muhammad’s address.
Certainly education about the Holocaust is important. What is troublesome is
the use o f the film as an historical document. As with most films based on real
events, the accuracy o f the events presented are put into question.6 In addition, ‘‘the
language o f these films feeds on the multivalent nature o f everyday life and touches
on prevailing conceptions of nation, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity” (1996, 1).
Like the Civil Rights films I will discuss in this chapter, the narrative in Schindler’s
List is structured in such a way as to construct the oppressed as victims (the Jews) for
the audience to pity and the White (Gentile) male protagonist as hero. According to
contemporary feature films, anti-Semitism, just like racism against Blacks, only
exists in the past.7 This is an interesting contemporary phenomenon. Films produced
during the studio system addressed these same issues as contemporary social
problems.
In the late 1980's and continuing into the 1990's, Hollywood studios released
an unusually high number of commercial films concerning racial inequality.8
Focusing on the disparity between the American tenet o f equality for all and the lived
experiences o f Black Americans, these films, well-received by both the popular
critics and general public, were set almost exclusively in the past, either during the
period o f enslavement or during what was to become known as the Civil Rights
Movement. Those films include Mississippi Burning (1988), The Long Walk Home
(1990), Ghosts o f Mississippi (1996). and Amistad (1997). During this time
Hollywood also released Crv Freedom (1987), Betrayed (1988), and A Time to Kill
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(1996). Though Crv Freedom concerned the past and not the United States, and both
Betrayed and A Time to Kill focused on the United States and not the past, they
share characteristics with the cycle o f historical Civil Rights films.
All o f these commercial features seem to present a liberal or progressive view
toward racial equity, yet ultimately they construct and reinforce the dominant
ideology, reinscribing racial power relations by ignoring the perspectives o f Black
Americans and Black Africans, presenting them merely as victims and plot devices.
The films marginalize Black populations, using oppressed communities as the
context for White heroism. This is not to say that Blacks were the only Americans
fighting against White supremacy. The exact opposite is true. I argue that the films
demonstrate the power to construct images, and ultimately a cultural memory, that
places Black people within the social positions defined by the Eurocentric culture
and outside the civil and human rights movements Blacks have created and
sustained.
These films operate as typical, contradictory Hollywood texts, denouncing
and condemning racist attitudes and practices, while at the same time re-affirming
the strengthened conservative values o f the American political climate at the time o f
their production, an era characterized by what Piliawski describes as “respectable
racism” (1984). During the Reagan Revolution and the Bush administration that
followed, racial minorities bore the brunt o f trickle-down economics. As many
scholars note, urban renewal programs devastated poor minority communities by
reducing low-income housing and raising taxes, environmental racism rose
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tremendously, continued White flight located places o f business and employment to
the suburbs, mortgage loans were increasingly denied to Black applicants,
un/underemployment in the Black community rose as international trade agreements
led to more corporate investments in Asia and Latin America, attacks on affirmative
action and voting rights were common; a racist war on drugs began on the federal,
state, and local levels, police brutality and harassment remained, and funds were cut
from social programs like Head Start and Aid for Families with Dependent Children
(Piliawsky 1984, Karenga 1985, Lipsitz 1995, Kelley 1997).
Within this cultural context, the motion pictures of this period presented what
Guerrero describes as a “disturbing resurfacing o f images from Hollywood’s pre-
civil rights past....a neominstrelsy” (1993, 122). The films projected an idealized
America o f racial harmony, where minorities knew their placement and were content
to remain within them. The highly popular action and musculinity movies brought
back the buddy formula, where the primary relationship between the White male
protagonist was not with a woman, but with his supportive Black male sidekick.
Though some critics would see this as progressive characterization, the
function o f the sidekick within the narrative reveals what Omi terms “inferencial
racism, apparently neutralized representations and situations regarding race that have
racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set o f unquestioned
assumptions” (1989, 113). This form o f racism in the media, more widespread and
common than the use o f stereotypes, is indeed insidious because as Stuart Hall (as
cited by Omi) argues “it is largely invisible even to those who formulate the world in
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its terms” (1989, 113). A closer look at such films as 48 Hours (1982), Lethal
Weapon (1987), and Die Hard (1988) reveal the sidekick as derided and often
demasculinized, serving as the liaison to criminalized minority communities and
functioning to heighten the effectiveness and masculinity o f the White hero.
Another “effective strategy to contain Blacks,” as Guerrero explains, “was the
all-too-commonplace industry practice o f giving an African American top billing in a
film in which he or she is completely isolated from other blacks or any reference to
the black world” (1993, 126). These were the kind o f narratives that brought
Whoopi Goldberg and Eddie Murphy, two o f the biggest stars o f the decade, to
prominence.
In the films which established them as box-office draws9, and for Goldberg
the short-lived status o f highest-paid female star, their supporting roles were as
characters most often used for comic relief. As protagonists their characters were
very much in the tradition o f Sidney Poitier, active in solving problems within White
communities. Given this context, we are presented on screen with a fantasy world o f
present-day America as truly a nation free o f bias... well at least in terms of race.
The only racial disharmony projected on to American movie screens were films that
were set it the past
Characterizing the Cycle
In terms o f storyline, the films of what I will call the Civil Rights cycle, vary
a great deal. First we have the films that were based on real people and events that
actually transpired: Richard Attenbourough’s docudrama Cry Freedom, starring
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Kevin Kline as newspaper editor Donald Woods and Denzel Washington as Stephen
Biko, takes place in South Africa during the mid-to-late 1970's. The film concerns
the consciousness-raising and politicization o f the White journalist inspired by his
friendship with Biko, the pivotal Black South African anti-apartheid activist who was
brutally tortured and killed by government authorities in 1977. Mississippi Burning.
directed by Alan Parker, takes place in Neshoba County, Mississippi in the summer
o f 1964. Based on the murders o f Civil Rights activists James Chaney, Andrew
Goodman, and Michael Schwemer committed in June o f that year, the film is a
detective thriller that focuses not on the issues at hand, but rather on the relationship
between the two FBI investigators Anderson and Ward, played by Gene Hackman
and Willem Dafoe. Ghosts o f Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner, starred Alec
Baldwin as attorney Bobby DeLaughter and Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie
Evers-Williams. Taking place in the present, the film is about the continued efforts o f
Evers to obtain justice for the 1963 murder of her husband, Civil Rights activist
Medgar Evers. One year later Amistad was released, a film about the 1839 revolt
that occurred on the slave ship Amistad. Also a courtroom drama, Steven
Spielberg’s narrative, featuring actors Anthony Hopkins and Djimon Hounsou,
focused on the trial that occurred when the liberated Africans arrived on American
soil.
Then we have the fictional films, those that center their narratives on the
issue o f White supremacy: A Time to Kill, yet another film focusing on the judicial
system. This time, Carl Lee Hailey, played by Samuel L. Jackson, seeks justice
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denied by the courts when two Whites are judged not guilty o f the rape and battery
o f his daughter. And lastly, Betrayed, directed by Costa-Gavras, is about an
undercover FBI agent Kathy Weaver (Debra Winger), who falls in love with the
White supremacist (Tom Berenger) she is investigating for murder.
Despite their differences in location, time period, genre, and narrative, these
films share many similarities. In fact, there are so many similarities that it may be
possible to consider the films as a distinct genre for they share storylines, character
types, locations, themes, and iconographies.
1. Time Period.
As noted above, the majority o f films within this cycle examine racism and
its discriminatory practices not within contemporary society, but in the past. As
Caputi and Vann (1997) note in their analysis o f Places m the Heart. “The placement
o f contemporary social issues, such as civil rights, into a mythic time frame allows
the issues to be contained, tamed, and ultimately dissolved.” Though it is important
to examine the historical past, this trend o f emphasizing past events and climate, via
the process o f dissolution, is dangerous because, for many viewers, it may suggest
that such issues are no longer relevant. As one person working as an extra in
Mississippi Burning commented, “If I had kids, I wouldn’t want them to watch this
movie...I don’t want them to see what people did endure back then” (Davis 1988, 55)
- a telling statement that not only reveals an apathy toward history and its influences
on contemporary dynamics, but also an assumption that racially motivated violence
no longer occurs, despite the contrary evidence that hate crimes are increasing in the
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United States. In addition, the convention o f narrative closure, particularly the
traditional happy ending, provides easy, expedient solutions to complex social
problems.
2. Displacement Through Narrative
Rather than utilizing a historical base, Betrayed displaces issues o f racism by
hiding them behind the veil o f a melodramatic romance. The organizing action o f
the Costa-Gavras film is not based on the investigator’s search for truth. Instead the
focus is on the development o f a romantic relationship.
Within most traditional narratives o f love and romance, there usually exists
an obstacle that complicates or interferes with the existing, or potential, relationship
between the lovers. In this film, for FBI agent Kathy Weaver, it is the predilection
for racist violence that is the only apparent flaw in the otherwise perfect character of
White supremacist Gary Simmons. Because the film functions as a romance,
concentrating on the love relationship rather than the greater societal issues it
purports to, it illustrates a pattern noted by Esnault in which film “obliterates social
significance, causing the entire action to lose its true significance” (1969, 8).
Mississippi Burning also fails to deal with race adequately because o f the
dependence o f romantic melodrama. The event that motivates Agent Ward to action
in the film is not the murders o f Chaney, Schwemer, and Goodman that occurred at
the beginning o f the film, but the discovery that Mrs. Pell, a woman with whom he
has developed a rapport, had been beaten by her husband, a suspect in the
investigation.
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3. Location
The process o f displacement is further complicated by the fact that all of
narratives take place in isolated and somewhat remote locales - small, back-water
Southern towns, an insular farming community in the Mid-West, colonial New
England, and the country o f South Africa, made remote by Americans’ general
ignorance o f world affairs and the thousands o f miles which remove it from the
immediate experience o f most o f them. O f course, this is not to mean that racism
does not exist within these areas and specific cultures, but that the settings are
problematic because they function within the texts by “furnishing both limited and
controlled backdrops.*’ As isolated places, they, as Cawelti states, “abstract the
stories from the complexity and confusion o f the larger world...providing a rationale
for avoiding the consideration o f those more complex problems o f social justice and
conflict” (1976, 96).
4. White Protagonists
Perhaps the m ost obvious manifestation o f racist ideologies inherent in every
one o f these films is their placement of White characters as the protagonists and
heroes o f the narratives. By placing White characters at the center o f cinematic
reality, the films not only place those affected most by racial intolerance at the
periphery, but also disavows the important contributions made by people o f African
descent in their struggles for equality. Again, this is not to suggest that White people
did not participate in those struggles, but not one o f these texts, as White states,
“challenges the hegemony that posits a White, middle-class perspective as the norm
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(1987, 14). This common practice leaves only two roles for Black people within the
narratives - as plot devices to politicize the White heroes or, more commonly, as
helpless victims.
Myrlie Evers-Williams functions in the narrative o f Ghosts o f Mississippi
solely as the grieving widow. There is no mention o f her work as a Civil Rights or
feminist activist; the establishment o f Mississippi’s first NAACP office, her run for
Congress, her service on the Los Angeles Board o f Public Works, or her role as the
National Chair o f the NAACP, the position she held during the time the movie takes
place, 1995. The film’s protagonist is district attorney Bobby De Laughter. And
though Reiner had admitted that he should not have placed the White attorney at the
center o f the narrative, he explained his decision to do so by claiming he wanted to
work with “what he knows.” His statement once again applied the norm of
Whiteness as universal, and denied humanity to Black Americans. I suppose that in
his mind loss, outrage, and a demand for justice were not universal enough to
warrant the placement o f a Black woman as protagonist.
In Amistad. former U.S. president John Quincy Adams is drawn by attorney
Baldwin, played by Matthew McConaughey, back into the courtroom to represent the
Africans on trial for killing the White crew who enslaved them. Though the film did
allow the Africans some level o f humanity, the film was heavy with White
paternalism, so much so, that a repeated metaphor used in the film was the attention
and care Adams, a horticulture hobbyist, paid to his prized African violets.
McConaughey was once again in the courtroom, this time in A Time to Kill.
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His character, White defense attorney Jack Tyler Brigance, fights diligently to save
Carl Lee Hailey, a working-class Black man who shoots and kills the two white men
acquitted o f raping his daughter.
Crv Freedom, which many had hoped would depict the life and death o f
Stephen Biko, turned out to be what White describes as a “white flight epic” (White
1987, 12). The main thrust o f the narrative is the politicization o f Donald Wood and
his adventurous journey to smuggle himself and his banned manuscript out o f the
country.
In the case o f Mississippi Burning, the film marginalizes Blacks by placing
them outside their own Civil Rights movement and then fills that void with the
representation o f the FBI as the true champion o f racial justice - an appalling
incongruity since the Federal Bureau o f Investigation has historically functioned to
impede the Civil Rights movement on many fronts.
O f the cycle, Mississippi Burning is perhaps the m ost insidious, weaving
fascist ideologies within a superficially progressive narrative. Described as a
“cinematic lynching o f the truth” (White 1988,60), the film blatantly manipulates
the facts o f the Chaney, Schwemer, and Goodman murders, including the actual
circumstances o f the killings.10 Certainly, one expects a docudrama to make use of
dramatic license, but as Lipsitz argues, “I f film-makers have our permission to tell
fanciful lies, we nonetheless insist that they make those lies moderately credible. We
require true lies, depictions o f the past and present that are comprehensible to us and
that locate our own private stories within a larger collective narrative” (1990, 163).
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Rather than solving the case as was done in reality, with a payment o f $30,000 to an
informant, the film utilizes what Kolker (1988) identifies as a m ajor narrative
component o f the conservative film, that which Ryan and Kellner describe as “force,
violence, and a disregard for the law....[arguing] against rational, liberal, and legal
processes in favor o f the exercise o f personalized force” (1988, 46). The film
subverts its denouncement of civil rights abuses by encouraging the audience to
cheer FBI agents who brutally abuse civil rights by using methods o f terrorism,
intimidation, and coercion.
The film’s manipulation o f reality is further complicated by the use of
documentary film styles. Mississippi Burning incorporates the superimposition o f
graphics detailing dates and locations, the hand-held technique o f cinema verite,
television news direct address, news bites, and most notably, at the film’s conclusion,
freeze-framed images o f the actors in character as found guilty. Reduced to
monochrome, the images are superimposed with captions informing us o f the length
o f sentences received and actual time served. These documentary conventions, as
Fiske notes, are sometimes designed to give the impression that the camera happened
upon a piece o f unmediated reality which it shows objectively and truthfully”
(1988, 30).
5. Black Victims
The practice o f constructing narratives focused on White protagonists
regenerated what film maker Julie Dash defines as the “victim-misery syndrome,”
where Black people have to be miserable victims waiting for a white savior to come
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along (as quoted by Harris 1986, 18). In Mississippi Burning they are even equated
with cows!
The majority o f Blacks in these films are nameless, indistinctive, and denied
subjectivity. Because the films do not employ the conventions enabling identification
audiences are kept at a distance. When Blacks are individualized!Crv Freedom’s
Stephen Biko, Ghosts o f Mississippi’s Medgar Evers, and Mississippi Burning’s
James Chaney) they are removed very quickly, i.e. murdered, to make room for the
Whites who will take the lead roles in the narratives. Though we know their names,
we never really know much about them. Crv Freedom at least provides some
background information about Biko, and he is even shown at rallies and protests
addressing issues o f apartheid. Mississippi Burning never explains who Chaney and
his companions were or what they actually did as activists. The same is true for
Medgar Evers in Ghosts o f Mississippi: all we know o f him is that he was shot down
in his own driveway.
Because Black women are not perceived as a forceful threat to the dominant
power structure, with sexism as well as racism serving to keep them in place, most
often the objects o f supremacist violence in film are men, castrated figuratively by
their representations o f powerlessness and passivity, or literally - as in the case of
one victim in Mississippi Burning.
An insightful comment in regard to the casting o f the victim roles was made
by Shari Rhodes, location director for the film. “Alan [Parker, the director], wanted
real Southern Black faces...or a British director’s idea o f what a Southern face looks
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like...dark skin, strong bone structure...Pretty people need not apply” (as quoted by
Corliss 1989, 59).
7. Racism as Violence and Violence as Spectacle
The victimization o f Black Americans and Black Africans in the films is
further complicated by the fact that the films define racism only as violence, and the
depiction o f that violence remains the most visually stunning moments presented.
Because the films are targeted toward mainstream audiences, those
representing the norm o f White, male, youthful, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian,
and middle-class, are presented in a positive light. By coding racism with stereotype
(Southern, working class, and uneducated) the films do not inspire the audience to
question their role in maintaining racial hegemony in the United States. The more
common, everyday manifestations o f White privilege are never presented, leaving the
audience to feel comfortable. After all, if they are not members o f supremacist
groups or commit hate-crimes against people o f color, then they are not racist and do
not benefit from unearned advantage.
The brutal violence committed by the truck-driving rednecks, and in the case
o f Cry Freedom the Nazi-esque South Africans, intended to shock audiences, may
actually serve more as seductive, visually entertaining scenes o f spectacle.
According to Esnault, “ ...sumptuous color on the wide screen [and] the pervasiveness
o f music and stereophonic sound,” function as a “fine attempt to put to sleep the
critical spirit”(1969, 8). The attacks by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi Burning, the
Soweto massacre in Crv Freedom, the murder o f Medgar Evers in Ghosts of
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Mississippi, and the sexual assault in A Time to Kill all manipulate the filmic
elements o f lighting, sound, color, editing, and camera movement to provide the
audience with sensuous, thrilling experiences o f violence.
Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed presents its moment o f spectacle within a hunting
scene reminiscent o f The Most Dangerous Game (1932). Undercover FBI agent
Weaver, now accepted into the White supremacist organization, accompanies a group
o f armed men into the forest to participate in what appears to be a regular sport with
them - the hunting o f people o f color. The intended prey o f the night’s pursuit is a
young Black man, who after being untied, is given a gun with ten bullets and a thirty-
second head start. After the given time has elapsed, the hunting party gives chase.
With the aid o f dogs and flashlights, they wound and eventually kill their prey. The
use o f the flashlights within the scene greatly enhances the element o f spectacle.
They are not needed for practical purposes, since the men making use o f them are lit
well enough for the audience to view the action. Instead, they function very much
like theatrical spotlights, aiding to further display the violence and death. It does not
help that the death o f the nameless young man is never pursued in the narrative. The
scene could be removed from the film without affecting the progression o f the
narrative. It functions here as dynamic titillation.
By offering only a privileged perspective, film’s omnipotent 3rd person p.o.v.
or that o f the violent racists, these scenes suture the viewer in a rather problematic
position. Are we to fantasize that we are taking part in the violence, obtaining
pleasure from the view o f illicit racist acts?
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Against the Grain o f Convention
In 1987 a Civil Rights film appeared in which the racial relations were
significantly different from the conventions o f the cycle noted above - The Long
Walk Home. The film to which I am referring is not the feature starring Whoopi
Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, directed by Richard Pearce, but the award winning short
thesis film directed by University o f Southern California graduate student Beverlyn
Fray". It is the film upon which the 1990 feature is based. In m any respects, Fray’s
motion picture remained within the confines defined, with its setting both in the
South and in the past, but the film also represents a radical departure. One o f the
most significant aspects o f the short film is its depiction o f the Civil Rights
Movement.
Ignorance regarding the complex history o f Black struggles and successes in
the United States remains endemic in contemporary thought and education.
Following in the “great man” tradition of history, where “history is made by the
inspired act o f outstanding individuals whose genius transcends the normal
constrains of historical contexts” (Allen and Gomery 53). Though I certainly do not
want to minimize the importance o f the numerous remarkable individuals whose
courage, talents, and sacrifices contributed greatly, this approach to history neglects
and renders invisible the participation o f others. This is especially true o f the Civil
Rights Movement, arguably one o f the largest grassroots movements in American
history. Despite centuries o f struggle, the effort o f Black Americans to obtain the
rights afforded White Americans is defined in popular thought by Martin Luther
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King Jr., from the event that brought him to national prominence, the Montgomery
Bus Boycott in 1955, to his assassination in 1968. True to the great m an approach,
little acknowledgment is given to the major role women played, and continue to play,
in the movement for social change. The Civil Rights Movement has been
circumscribed as male, middle-class, and assimilationist.
The Long Walk Home, set in Montgomery, Alabama, concerns the public
bus boycott, but does not focus on the figure o f Martin Luther King, Jr. Rather, it is
the story o f a Black domestic worker, Odessa Cotter (Irene Nettles) and the effects of
the Boycott on her and her family. By setting the film in this context, Fray highlights
one o f the most-well-known events o f the Movement but reveals unacknowledged
aspects o f it - -the importance o f collective action, the role o f women, and the
consequences o f resisting Jim Crow.
As the Boycott is generally remembered and taught in grammar school, Rosa
Parks, too tired to stand, was arrested on the afternoon o f December 1, 1955 for
refusing to give up her seat to a White man. Martin Luther King, Jr., informed o f the
arrest, arrives in Montgomery, organizes the boycott, is successful, and becomes a
nationally recognized leader o f the Movement - a simplistic and erroneous account.
The boycott was about more than being able to sit in the front o f the bus, it was not
organized by King, and it involved more women than Rosa Parks.
As historians have noted, Black citizens o f Montgomery used public
transportation more than White citizens, and Black women even more so. But to do
so was often costly and dangerous. As Kelley explains, “Contrary to the experiences
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o f White workers, for whom public space eventually became a kind o f‘democratic
space’ where people o f different class backgrounds shared city theaters, public
conveyances, streets, and parks, for Black people White dominated space was
vigilantly undemocratic and potentially dangerous” (Kelly 56). Black passengers
had to pay in the front, then exit the bus to enter from the back door. It was not
uncommon for operators to close the doors, abandoning Black passengers who had
paid their fares. Drivers would leave waiting Black passengers on the roadside,
refusing to stop if they anticipated a large number of White passengers further down
the route. Verbal abuse and physical abuse were common as well, for drivers were
usually well-armed. There are numerous accounts o f men, women, and children who
were arrested, assaulted, shot, and even killed.
In May o f 1955, the W omen’s Political Council, founded in 1946 by Dr.
Mary Fair Burks, an English professor at Alabama, and led by Jo Ann Robinson, met
with Montgomery mayor W. A. Gayle regarding the ill treatment o f Blacks on public
transportation. Their demands included:
1. A city law that would make it possible for Negroes to sit from the
back toward the front, and Whites from the front toward the back until
all seats are taken.
2. That Negroes not be forced to pay their fares at the front and go to the
rear o f the bus to enter.
3. That buses stop at every comer in residential sections occupied by
Negroes as they do in communities where Whites reside.
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Though cities in Georgia such as Atlanta, Savannah, and Macon had already adopted
such policies, and the city o f Mobile, Alabama, as well, no such changes were made
in Montgomery, despite the threat from more than twenty-five local organizations to
boycott. A number o f arrests followed - all women: Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old
student, in March, Mary Louise Smith in October; and then Rosa Parks in December.
The day after the last arrest, December 2, 1955, the call for the boycott went out. Jo
Ann Robinson composed and copied a leaflet and the WPC organized a distribution
network composed primarily o f students. In addition, women like Inez Ricks and
Georgia Gilmore organized the car pool that helped sustain the Boycott for thirteen
months, complete with 325 cars, 43 dispatch stations, and 42 pick-up stations. They
held fundraisers to pay for the cost o f gasoline and to maintain the vehicles, and
published a newsletter to keep residents abreast o f news. (Robnett 1983, Robinson
1987, Burks 1993).
Contemporary popular misconceptions have not only removed women from
participation in the Boycott, they also reduced Rosa Parks to the passive victim
stereotype. As Robnett describes, and Parks herself has exclaimed, she was not too
physically tired to stand. Her decision to remain seated was a conscious political act.
Indeed, Parks was thrown o ff o f a public bus twelve years before (1997). In addition,
she had a great deal of experience as a participant in the fight for Black equality, for
she had been active for more than 15 years as a member o f the NAACP and was
secretary o f the local chapter.
Though The Lone Walk Home uses the context o f the Boycott and follows
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classical Hollywood narrative style, it does so without glamour and excessive
production values. Fray’s film also refutes the great White man approach to history
common in the cycle because the protagonist is Black, female, and working class.
Fray’s characterization o f Odessa Cotter, produced years before Lilly Harper o f the
NBC series FH Fly Awav. opposes the mammy stereotype o f the Black domestic
worker so prevalent in mass media. Odessa is intelligent, sensitive, and is more
interested in the welfare o f her own family than o f the family for which she works.
We know from the very start o f the film that the arrest o f bus passengers is a
common occurrence, for when her two sons arrive home, excited and waving a piece
o f paper, they call out, “Another woman has been arrested!” The boys gather around
Odessa, and joined by their father, read the pamphlet, presumably the one printed by
Robinson, announcing the arrest o f Rosa Parks and the Boycott to begin the
following Monday. That night, Odessa expresses her concerns about the Boycott,
worried because “Every time White folks and Black folks butt heads in Montgomery,
we’re the ones that have to suffer.” When her husband responds that “Somebody has
got to do something,” she recognizes the fact that she is somebody - and thus the film
not only recognizes the role everyday people played in the Movement, but the
facility for social change still possible by the individuals viewing the film. Their
conversation also speaks to the inherent dangerous involved in challenging the status
quo. The Boycott, which lasted over a year, cost local merchants over two million
dollars and nearly bankrupted the bus company. Violence was directed at the
protestors, and Martin Luther King’s home was fire bombed.
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Her employer, Miriam (Deborah G. Dalton) Thompson feels sympathy for
Odessa who, as a participant o f the Boycott, walks 7 miles a day to get to work.
Miriam even reveals embarrassment when her mother, husband, and brother-in-law
openly enjoy racist jokes and discuss their opposition to Black equality during
Christmas dinner, with no regard for Odessa and a Black woman hired for the day,
who serve them. She clandestinely arranges to pick Odessa up at the colored market,
as m any White women actually did at the time, and continues to do so on a regular
basis, at least until her husband finds out. When confronted by her husband, Miriam
turns to Odessa, demanding to know “why she [Odessa] wants her to suffer?,”
revealing to us that M iriam’s concern was not for Odessa’s safety or her lack o f
transportation, but for the efficient running o f her household. Odessa retorts, “I am
not asking you to suffer,” and promptly quits.
With a lack o f job prospects, Odessa resorts to taking in wash and working
part time as a domestic in a house closer to her home. Her laundry work is
interrupted when Miriam visits, seeing Odessa’s home for the first time. She has
come to ask Odessa to resume working for her. She politely declines. Then, in
saying goodbye, Miriam for the first time is able to see Odessa as a person,
addressing her not as Odessa, but as Mrs. Cotter.
When Fray’s short film was adapted into a Hollywood feature three years
later, in 1990, the narrative was changed, and it fell back into the conventions o f the
Civil R ight’s cycle. Though it was, in a sense a groundbreaking film, for it kept it’s
grass roots focus and remained a narrative about women’s participation in the
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movement, it too resorted to the conventions o f the Civil Right’s cycle o f films.
M iriam’s character w as given increased importance, and Odessa’s less. So much so,
that the greatest suffering was that o f Miriam, who experiences marriage troubles
because o f her participation in the Civil Rights struggle (The attorneys in A Time to
Kill and Ghosts o f Mississippi have the same problem).
Examining these views o f the past reveals once again the interests of the
status quo and the use o f media by Black women film makers to provide a counter
cinema. The altering o f history in the Hollywood productions, for the purposes o f
enhancing entertainment value and commercial viability, has resulted in narratives
that constitute the very substance o f the dominant ideologies’ values, systems, and
institutions. The films work not for progressive social change, but to reaffirm that
which shapes the society as one o f continued racism and dominations. As Lipsitz
states, “What we choose to remember about the past, where we begin and end our
retrospective accounts, and who we include and exclude from them - these do a lot to
determine how we live and what decisions we make in the present” (Lipsitz 34).
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
1. Many Black producers o f race films challenged racial stereotypes in film and the
culture o f white hegemony that produced them. One of the most noted is the Lincoln
Motion Picture Company, founded in Los Angeles. Its films, as Reid notes, tended
to be family oriented, serious narratives constructed around a Black, rural hero
(1993,9). The company’s first feature, for example. The Realization o f a Negro’s
Ambition (1916), focused on a Tuskegee graduate denied a job because o f his race.
2. Those supporting the NAACP in its efforts against Birth o f a Nation include the
Negro Welfare League, the Urban League, and the United Irish League. They were
aided by the work o f unions, students, churches, the Black press, and community
members in their activism against the film. Their efforts included refusing to
advertise the film in publications, protests outside theaters, distribution o f
pamphlets, and pressuring state censorship boards.
3. Another example o f amnesia suffered by American popular memory is The
Forgotten War, The Korean War, which did not end in victory for the United States
either.
4. As Tasker notes, there have always been action movies produced by the
Hollywood film industry. What changed was the emphasis on the fascistic
idealization o f the hyper masculine white body, perhaps as a reaction to shifting
gender roles that called into question definitions o f masculinity.
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5. Examples o f such films include Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action
(1984), and Rambo (1985).
6. Oskar Schindler’s widow, Emilie Schindler has recently contested the accuracy o f
the film.
7. Most o f the films are set during the period o f Nazi rule in Germany and concern
the Holocaust and the aftermath. Sophie’s Choice (1982), Enemies: A Love Storv
(1987), Reunion (1989), Swing Kids (1993), and Hollywood’s remake o f the East
German film Jakob the Liar (1999). Another example o f anti-Semitism set in the
past is School Ties (1992), which takes place in the 1950's.
8. Though not an extremely large number o f films, they represent a significant
number when one considers the low number o f social problem, or social issue films,
released by the major distributors.
9. For Eddie Murphy - 48 Hours. Trading P laces (1983), Best Defense (1984), and
th e Beverly Hills C op series (1984, 1987, and 1994); and for Goldberg - Jumpin’
Jack Flash (1986) Burglar (1987), Fatal Beauty (1987), Clara’s Heart (1988), Ghost
(1990), and Sister Act (1992).
10. The murder occurred on an isolated road at night. According to historians, it
was likely that given his familiarity with the area, the Black youth, James Chaney
was driving. The film places him in a more passive position, as it does the other
Blacks in the film, by locating him in the back seat. In addition, forensic evidence
revealed that he, unlike the two Jewish activists, was brutally tortured before being
shot. This is not shown in the film’s murder scene.
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11. Fray was recognized with the Black American Filmmaker Award and the film
placed 1st in Focus, a national student filmmaking competition.
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CHAPTER THREE
EXPLODING MYTHS AND EXPANDING:
CAMILLE BILLOPS AND DOCUMENTARY
While Julie Dash confronts the Hollywood film industry and its practices,
Camille Billops addresses the stereotypes contained within their productions. Like
Dash Billops also experiments with form, applying techniques o f self-reflexivity, but
doing so the realm of the non-fiction film.
From the mammy image that emerged during the era o f enslavement to the
pathological and castrating matriarch to the contemporary stereotype o f the ultra-
fertile welfare queen, our culture’s unrelenting attitudes have continued to link Black
femininity with motherhood for centuries. The image o f Black woman as the
nurturing care-giver is so ubiquitous that we can safely say that it has been subject to
the process o f mystification as described by Barthes (1972), whereby products of
history have been transformed into essential types. As Patricia Hill Collins argues,
stereotyped maternal images control and contain the possibilities and lives o f real
Black women in the United States (1990). Historically the archetype o f the Black
mother is situated at “the pivotal and socially explosive categories o f race, gender,
and class, she plays a central role in both the cultural history and mythology o f the
country by crossing socially imposed and often dichotomized categorizations o f
American culture” ( Parks 1989,1). In her study o f the history o f the quintessential
Black mother and her function, Parks reveals the ways in which the Black mother
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archetype serves to resolve the paradoxes o f race, class, and gender. A good example
o f this process is Whoopi Goldberg, whose image is open to a number o f individual
meanings and competing ideological interpretations, a major factor which has made
her one o f the only Black actresses to work continuously in the industry. For over a
decade now, Goldberg’s image has simultaneously assimilated into and fought
against the values o f the dominant culture, calling into question gender, race,
sexuality, and class, often in contradictory ways.
White, young, and thin. As I explain in the next chapter, these continue to be
the standards by which mainstream m edia determines attractiveness for women.
Those who do not fit the type tend to be cast primarily in secondary or character
roles. Yet Goldberg, who fits none o f the recommended criteria, maintains
characterizations as protagonists w ithin conventional Hollywood narratives. Her
images tend to concentrate on highlighting contrasting racial difference. In early
films, for comic effect, she is often sporting wigs that are blonde (the epitome o f
Whiteness) or wigs with long, straight hair, concealing her dread locks underneath.
Yet the images are not o f an attempt to assimilate, rather, they function to delineate
difference. The difference is usually minimized by her acceptance into the dominant
culture. (In her career o f two-dozen film s there are only two in which she interacts
with a Black community).
Her roles in films like Clara’s H eart (1988), Corrina Corrina (1994), and
Bovs on the Side (1995) are often viewed as the time-worn stereotype o f the
mammy, but a closer examination o f h er image as the Black mother reveals it too, to
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be contradictory. Unlike the mammy, characterized as asexual, Goldberg’s images
can be read as both sexual and asexual. When not presented with a romance on the
screen, the films present a sexual tension or suggest sexual attraction in subtle ways,
as in Fatal Beauty (1987).
Another characteristic o f the wise and loving mammy is her servile position
within the W hite household, an aspect altered by Goldberg’s interpretations. In the
television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Goldberg, the only recurring Black
actress on the science-fiction series, plays the intergalactic bartender Guinan, owner
and operator o f the starpship Enterprise’s bar/lounge Ten Forward. Providing
sustenance as for the body as well as the soul, Guinan’s characterization raises
several questions ignored by the usual stereotypical depiction. Through both
narrative and form, issues regarding Guinan’s history, personal relationships, and
references to unknown powers possessed contradict the position of a mammy within
the social hierarchy.
We can see the pervasiveness o f the Black mother image today not only in
the celebrity persona o f Goldberg, but also in the unprecedented popularity o f talk-
show-host-tumed-actress Oprah Winfrey, whom Parks describes as “perhaps the
most endeared Black mother o f the post-industrial era” (1989). The characterization
o f the secretary who would later become a lawyer, Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay
Hamilton) on ABC’s television show The Practice, also presents a nurturing Black
mother figure, for she often serves as the moral compass for defense attorney Bobby
Donell (Dylan McDermott). On Ally McBeal. another show developed and produced
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by David E. Kelley there is Lisa Nicole Carson’s character Renee Radick. Renee is
the only regularly appearing Black character and the only woman on the show
without a gaunt, undersized body-type, fitting her into the physical expectation o f the
mammy role. And while the other women are portrayed both on the job and at home,
Renee’s locale is the domestic sphere, where she dispenses advice to her lovelorn
roommate Ally. Queen Latifah, the hip-hop recording artist, strengthened her image
as the wiser, maternal figure she played in films like House Party fl (1991) and Juice
(1992) on the Fox television series Living Single. Though she has since appeared in
a number o f different films from varied genres, playing a myriad o f character types,
Latifah seems to be following in the path o f Goldberg, remembered most for her
roles as a nurturer. In addition to the roles noted above, she has played Liz Baily,
advisor to divorcee Judith M ohr (Holly Hunter) in Living Out Loud (1998) and nurse
to the paralyzed forensic specialist in the mystery thriller The Bone Collector
(1999). The role of the Black mother has been so integrated into Queen Latifah’s
star persona that she is perceived to be older than she is. Other actresses who have
been cast in the role o f the Black mother include blues singer Ruth Brown in Hair
Spray (1987), Gail Neely as the vengeful mother in the cult film SurfN azi’s Must
Die (1987), Cicely Tyson in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) as Sipsey (a name
reminiscent o f classic monikers for mammies, Beulah, Bessie, and Sadie), Vivica
Fox as Jasmine in Independence Dav (1996), and Gloria Foster as the all-knowing
Oracle in The Matrix (1999).
Motherhood certainly offers its own pleasures and powers, and as scholars
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have noted, the role o f Black mother is not necessarily a negative one (Collins 1990,
Janies 1993). “Forms o f mothering, which have their roots in a traditional African
world-view, may serve as an important Black feminist link to the development o f
new models for social transformation in the twenty-first century” (James 1993, 45).
What is problematic is her construction in the media and popular culture, her
function within society as selfless nurturer to all but herself, the way the image
constrains the life choices o f real Black women.
The construction o f motherhood in general within Western culture has been a
topic o f great consternation. Mothers are usually idealized as either the self-
deprecating, all sacrificing figure or the disdained sadistic, monstrous mother.
Rarely are mothers permitted full-personhood, which includes sexuality and desires
o f their own. All aspirations, energies, emotions, and endeavors are expected to be
in the service o f the family. Some scholars see this institutionalization o f women’s
reproductive power, compounded with myths o f the nuclear family, as the basis o f
gender oppression (Beauvoir 1953, Firestone 1970, Rich 1976). According to
Chodorow, ‘T h a t women mother is a fundamental organizational feature o f the sex-
gender system: It is basic to the sexual division o f labor and generates a psychology
and ideology o f male dominance as well as an ideology about women’s capacity and
nature” (1978, 209). Though certainly restrictive for all women, it even more so for
Black women, who have not experienced the equality o f opportunity afforded White
women in the arenas o f education, politics, and employment.
Director Camille Billops1, an artist o f sculpture and painting who has
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expanded her artistic vision and talents to film, has rejected such culturally defined
gender roles in her life and in her work, focusing on issues related to the dynamics of
family while also interrogating race, class, and sexuality. Her first film, Suzanne
Suzanne (1982), which started out as a documentary about her niece Suzanne’s
recovery from heroin addiction, became a harrowing film about violence committed
against women in the home. In an attempt to preserve middle-class respectability,
both Suzanne and her mother Billie (Camille’s sister) maintained a code o f silence
about the abuse they suffered at the hands o f the family’s patriarch. A daring and
painfully intimate film, Suzanne Suzanne raised the issue of domestic abuse long
before it became a national issue. The film is especially noteworthy, for as Beth
Richie and bell hooks have discussed, domestic violence is particularly challenging
within the Black community because disclosure is aligned with disloyalty. Black
families are already stereotyped within our culture as pathological, and the spiral o f
silence maintained by communities o f color is attributed to an effort to counter the
negative images o f Black men, constructed as criminal and ultra-violent. Suzanne
Suzanne disrupts the facade o f the functional nuclear family and intervenes in the
perpetuation o f the codes that allows such abuses to continue.
Themes o f family run consistently through Billops’ work. Her second film,
Older Women and Love (1987), inspired by an aunt’s romantic affair with a younger
man, celebrates women’s sexuality and the reversal o f the Jennifer syndrome, while
KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) uses Billops’ interracial relationship with
husband James Hatch to launch a treatise on racism in America. Her latest film,
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Take Your Bags (1998), recounts the loss o f African culture experienced by
enslaved Africans upon travel to the New World and appropriation o f it by the elitist
Art world. Billops shares the story, delivered as a children’s fable, with us,
incorporating her own family history into the narrative.
The documentaries directed by Camille Billops are films o f great esthetic
innovation, for she avoids the old tired forms o f non-fiction filmmaking and the
reliance on narration or talking heads. In Finding Christa she explodes myths o f
motherhood and the nuclear family, while also testing the tenuous boundaries
between fiction and documentary, all while crossing another line, that between
observer and subject. Finding Christa, awarded the prize for Best Documentary at
Sundance in 1992, is Billop’s first foray into the autobiographical documentary. She
takes us back several decades in her life, when, at the age o f 27, she gave her four-
year-old daughter Christa up for adoption. It is a remarkable film, for it delves into
complex levels of psychological pain through an equally complex narrative form,
blending the stylistic conventions o f fiction, non-fiction, and the avant garde while
simultaneously manipulating the time lines o f the events presented - so much so that
it becomes difficult to tell fact from fiction. It may even be difficult for some
scholars to even consider it a documentary in the classic sense. But before we
consider that question, it would be useful to try and determine just what a
documentary is, for perhaps no other term in the discipline film studies has been such
a challenge to define.
Part o f the problem with discussing documentary film is the lack o f literature.
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Until very recently, it was the most neglected area o f study within the discipline of
film. As Bill Nichols noted in the forward to his study, Representing Reality, his
manuscript, published in 1991, was the first book-length study o f non-fiction film
since 1976! The gap in the literature is slowly being filled, by anthologies and
essays applying the theories o f semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxist and
feminist approaches for close textual analysis, industry studies, and audience
reception2.
Though he did not define term documentary at the time, John Grierson, one
o f the most important figures in non-fiction filmmaking, coined the term in 1926,
when he used it to describe Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in a review. The meaning
o f the word has remained the subject o f debate ever since.
In some sense, all films serve as documents, preserving for posterity a
number o f cultural characteristics reflecting the cultural contexts o f their production.
At the same time, no film can claim it is a direct, unmanipulated representation o f
reality. All films are fictions, for they are all mediated representations. The non
fiction films manipulates cinematic codes just as a fiction film does, using lighting,
mise en scene, sound, camera work, and editing to manipulate the audience,
appealing to either intellect or emotion to argue their points. Nonfiction films even
use the same narrative devices as the Classical Hollywood Narrative - main
characters, conflict, cause-and-effect linear order, tension, and climax. Filmmaker
Trinh T. Minh Ha, has even gone so far as to say there is no such thing as a
documentary! Though her point, supported by other scholars, is understandable, the
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distinction between fiction and non-fiction should be recognized, for the term
documentary still has currency withing the worlds o f filmmaking, film scholarship,
and film viewing. But to what does the term refer? A category o f material, a genre,
a set o f techniques? Attempts to define the term have included examinations o f the
degree o f control, use and function, genre, relation to the subject and relation to the
audience.
The first approach to defining documentary is the degree o f control,
consideration o f the control filmmakers have over their subjects. Common
understanding o f film production suggest that the difference between a non-fiction
and fiction film is that a documentary filmmaker has less control over the subject
than his or her colleague working in the realm o f fiction. As Nichols explains, this is
not a satisfactory definition, as there can be a high degree o f control in the
production o f a documentary, in every phase o f production. It is not unusual for
directors to carefully screen their participants, and in the case o f interviews, to
conduct preliminary interviews to get a preview o f the anecdotes and details that will
be recounted on camera. Connie Fields, for example, interviewed over sixty women
before deciding on the final five that would included in the award-winning
documentary The Life and Times o f Rosie the Riveter (1980)3. Erol Morris carefully
manipulated every cinematic element to play on the audience’s emotions and
assumptions in his film The Thin Blue Line (1988). And in my own experience, I
have chosen the clothes for participants’to wear for their on camera interviews,
rummaging through their wardrobes to find clothing that would project the needed
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personas for the film. There are also many circum stanc es o f fiction production
where there is a distinct lack o f control, as in the recent box-office phenomenon B lair
Witch Project (1999). Actors improvised their lines, were placed on location and,
interacted with both actors and real people while unaware o f who was which, and
even shot much o f the included footage themselves.
Another characteristic used to delineate the difference between fiction and
documentary is use and function. Filmmakers like John Grierson, the Englishman
who founded the National Film Board o f Canada and filmmaker considered the
originator o f the social issue documentary; and Pare Lorentz, director o f The Plow
that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1927) thought that documentaries are
those film s in the service o f an argument that emanates from social or historical
registers. This too, is problematic, for as discussed in the previous chapter, fictional
or imagined narratives can serve the same purpose.
It is also not uncommon for some to consider documentary a genre. This is
completely inapplicable. For a group o f films to be grouped together as a genre, they
mush share similar character types, themes, storylines, style, and iconography. The
contents and styles o f non-fiction films vary to such a degree that this is too is not
suitable. For the purposes o f this essay, I will rely on the definition put forth by
Nichols, who uses a definition based on relation to the subject and relation to the
audience.
A s Nichols explains, the most fundamental difference between narrative
fiction and the documentary is the status o f the text in relation to the material world.
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“Cues within the text and assumptions based on past experience prompt us to infer
that the images we see (and many o f the sounds that we here) had their origin in the
historical world” (1991, 250). In addition, an unspoken pact exists between the
filmmaker and the audience; that the filmmaker will present real people, in real
places, in eras that really existed, and real events and activities. Audiences prepare
not to watch a fantasy story, but to grasp an argument.
Historically, we have seen shifts in approach and style in documentary,
ranging from the expository mode in early film, where a narrator addresses the
spectators, explaining the images presented; the observational films, often referred to
as cinema verite, where the filmmakers try to be as unobtrusive and record events as
they unfold; the interactive, which makes extensive use o f interviews and thus the
filmmakers are more interactive with their subjects; and the reflexive, where the
filmmaker not only engages with the subject, but with the spectators as well in a
mode o f self-relexivity. A particular type o f self-reflexive documentary emerged in
the early 1970's as a result o f technological advances in film and social advances in
society - the autobiographical, or first person documentary.
These complex, subjective films are often characterized by the skillful
weaving together o f interviews, first person narration, old family photographs, direct
address, and visits to locations were important life changes occurred for the
filmmaker. The form emerged from individuals and communities that have been
rendered invisible —women, people o f color, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, and the
working class. This trend, which rapidly developed in the 1970's with films such as
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Joyce at 24 (Joyce Chopra and Claudie Weill 1972), Nana Mom and Me (Amale
Rothschild 1974) and continued into the 1980's with Marilu Mallet’s Unfinished
Diary (1986), Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs, (1989), Spenser Nakasako and
Sokly N y’s A.K.A Don Bonus (1995), Yvonne Welbon’s Remembering Wei Yi
Fang. Remembering Mvself (1997V and Macky Alston’s Family Name (1997).
Eroding the boundaries between the public and private, objectivity and subjectivity,
and fact and fiction, the genre may have emerged as both a symptom and response to
the challenge o f social location in postmodern society, for they are often fragmented
in narrative and style - exploring identity not as a singularly whole - but as varied
and multiple. These personal stories reveal larger social issues - providing the
marginalized and disempowered a voice while also validating themselves, their
experiences, their life-choices, and their creative practices. These films all share
similarity with other autobiographical works, writings by women. As Julia Lesage
explains,
Women’s autobiographical documentaries question ideologies of
the familiar, the family, and the natural, even as they evoke moments
from the domestic sphere with great emotional impact. In exploring
the domestic sphere, women’s autobiography makes use o f the daily
textualizing o f identity to develop aesthetic forms artfully drawn
from a close examination o f daily life. However, these
autobiographical artists also contest the bonds o f domesticity.
Their works detail the ideological and institutional limits on
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women’s lives and in this way, they analyze how a woman’s
subjectivity is acted upon (447).
The work o f Camille Billops adheres to the last two conditions, yet it still
transgresses the boundaries o f what we would generally consider documentary,
blending the stylistic conventions o f fiction, non-fiction and the avant garde while
simultaneously manipulating the time lines of the events presented - so much so that
it become difficult to determine what is real and what isn’t. According to Valerie
Smith, this is representative o f an increasing trend in Black filmmaking. She has
observed that in contemporary fiction films by Black directors, fictional narratives
are becoming more like documentary, and documentaries are becoming more
experimental. “The narratives [of fiction films] are increasingly constructed as a part
o f the widely shared and recognizable reality; and the documentaries gesture toward
the fictional or artificial in the attempt to enter suppressed narratives into public
discourse” (1992, 57). Rather than minimizing the impact o f the filmmaking
process, the narrative strategy o f self-reflexivity deconstructs the ideology o f realism,
and the traditional o f filmmaking that has so misaligned marginalized communities.
Like Mulvey’s call for a new form o f visual pleasure in fictional films, a language
not based on gender hierarchy, other feminist theorists have made the same demand
for documentary. “The truth o f our oppression cannot be captured on celluloid by
means o f an innocent camera, for feminist cinema to be effective, it must be a
counter-cinema” (Johnston 1973, 28).
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A good example o f this is the Death Row scene from Suzanne Suzanne. This
highly stylized scene, with its minimalist setting, dramatic lighting, and careful
subject positioning provides a compelling contrast to the rest o f the film, which takes
place in the easily recognizable domestic settings o f living rooms, bathrooms, and
kitchens. Suzanne and her mother Billie are in a sort o f limbo. They are the only
distinguishable figures, standing within a dark void. In this scene o f confrontation,
where Suzanne questions her mother about the physical abuse her father inflicted
upon her as a child, Billops has blocked their positions so that Suzanne faces towards
us, looking o ff screen to the left while her mother stands behind her. Neither are able
to see the other’s face. In this remarkable long take, lasting more than six minutes,
we leam for the first time, why Billie could not protect her daughter:
Suzanne. Mom, do you love me?
Billie. Yes, Suzanne. I love you very much.
Suzanne. Do you remember death row?
Billie. Yes, I remember death row...where your daddy used to take you
to give you your punishment...in your bedroom. I remember that
very much.
Suzanne. Why didn’t you stop dad from beating me?
Billie. Well, you had probably done something that had gone against
the rules and regulations, and then daddy would take you to
death row and I would hear him, and then when I couldn’t
stand it any longer, and I would go in there and say ok, that’s
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enough. That’s enough. That’s enough...and sometimes he would
stop, sometimes he wouldn’t stop but m ost o f the time I would
always intervene. That’s enough Brownie...that’s enough...
that’s enough.
Suzanne. Mom, did daddy beat you from the beginning?
Billie. Yes. The first time I ever got beaten up I think Michael [Suzanne’s
brother] was just a little thing...when your daddy first came home
from overseas. I don’t know what happened, but I got knocked
across the chair...when we used to live over on 38th street, so
you wouldn’t remember that because you weren’t bom. But
on 38th street...that was my first indication that I was going to be
beaten up. So he knocked me across the chair. Though o f course
I didn’t stand up and fight because I just thought, “Oh, how could
he possibly do something like this?” Then later on I began to
fight back, but in the beginning I did not fight back.
Suzanne. Was it the same as being on death row? Your beatings?
Billie. I think so. I don’t even know who developed that name,
death row. I really don’t know. But I guess it was like death
row. If he’d ever get made at me...we’d be out someplace...
he said I danced to close...for that...a look would go across
his face and I knew that when we got home I was going to
go to death row. Yeah, I guess that was death row for me too.
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Suzanne. Would you like to know what it was like to wait?
Billie. Yeah, I remember what it was like to wait. Maybe that’s
why I used to run and jump in the shower. When I ’d hear
him come home. He’d slam the door to the car and I could
tell when he slammed the door that he was either drunk or
mad or something...and I would immediately go up....
(As we watch, we can see that Billie is starting to relive the
experience, and she begins to cry).
Suzanne. Well, would you like to hear what is was like for me, waiting?
Billie. (Struggling to speak) I’d get in the shower....
Suzanne. (After a long pause) Why are you crying?
Billie. Because I remember what it was like..that awful fear about what’s
Brownie going to do, what is he going to say...I would be so
terrified sometimes. I would get these pains in the back of my....
back....I understand how you felt...I really understand Suzanne
how it felt to go on death row and perhaps...I felt when your daddy
died so absolutely free. You know, I felt liberated. I loved your
daddy very much...but I...it was...the first in ten years...I loved
your daddy very much...you know the sun would shine on Brownie,
or whatever he did was right and then after ten years it began to go
away because it was just kind o f a hell that I was in...I just knew I
would never get out o f it. I just knew I wouldn’t and to me, when
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your daddy died I was free. And I didn’t have to fo through this
anymore. And I could do some o f the things I always wanted...
to do.
A poignant and distressing scene to witness, this shot presents the
psychological damage the women suffered as they try and recount the physical
damage they endured. It is readily apparent that this is the first time Billie has ever
spoken to her daughter about the spousal abuse, and perhaps even he first time she
has reflected upon it herself. The setting is important. As I noted previously, it is the
only scene that takes place outside o f the domestic sphere, which is significant
because it was the domestic space that placed them in danger and m ade it difficult for
them to relate openly. Here, in this otherworld they are able to speak freely and to
connect on levels previously not possible (Having reached a new level o f
understanding, the two women embrace as Billie cries into her daughter’s arms).
The spuriousness o f the shot’s composition and mise en scene has caused some
spectators to doubt the veracity o f the emotional exchange, wondering if the scene
had been scripted and acted by the participants. Billops has repeatedly stated that it
was not, that it completely spontaneous. She knew that Suzanne was going to ask
questions o f her mother, but she had knowledge of neither the questions nor the
responses (hooks 1996, 145). It is my conjecture that the positioning o f the subjects
was in order to facilitate the discussion. It would have been difficult for the two
women to talk about the past face to face. And though the staging calls attention to
the artificiality o f the film, the sheer emotional power bestows it a quality o f
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authenticity. In Finding Christa Billops continues to flirt with the m ixing o f
nonfiction with fiction, and took it to new heights, interrupting the narrative with
poetic, surrealistic fantasy sequences that serve as a metaphors and commentary on
the unfolding events.
As with all title sequences, the opening o f Finding Christa reveals themes to
be explored within the unfolding o f the narrative. As this film begins, w e hear sad,
slow nursery music and see images o f Christa as a toddler: a black and white photo
and home movies. In a voice over, we hear the adult Christa, speaking in a child-like
voice, “M y last memory o f you is when you drove off and left me at the Children’s
Home Society. I didn’t understand why...you left me, and I felt so alone. Why did
you leave me?” By starting the film in this manner, Billops very successfully
communicates the pain of desertion experienced by Christa, emotions heightened by
the music and lament in her voice as she asks, “Why did you leave me?” - - the
question the film attempts to answer. Immediately after this opening, the film shifts
to the present. Camille, in her studio with photographer Correen Simpson, shows her
a audiotape and photograph o f Christa, explaining that she has a daughter, whom she
gave her up for adoption over twenty years ago. Then a cut follows, to home movie
footage o f Billops bathing the infant Christa as the query is repeated again, As home
movies o f Christa’s baptism are shown, she, and we, are is finally given an answer. A
voice over from Billops explains, “I was trying to give her something else, because I
felt she needed a mother and a father. I am sorry about the pain it caused Christa as a
young child, but I’m not sorry about the act.” This set up is the structure on which
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the film builds, for it lays the foundation for a dual subjectivity. The first third of the
film concerns the answer to the question posed during the title, the second section
with Christa’s experiences in the Children’s Home Society and her adoptive family,
and the last third with the developing adult relationship between the two women.
The title itself is telling, for the film is not about Camille’s search for the daughter
she gave up in 1956 (Billops contacted the Children’s Home Society several years
previously and left her contact information should Christa wish to find her). It is
about Christa’s quest -- the search for her identity.
The transition between the two subjectivities is a strange, dream-like scene of
an imagined audition for a mother-daughter recital. In it, Billops, dressed in a white
dress with blue ribbons, sings/yodels on stage, accompanied by a pianist, Christa,
dressed in a shirt, tie, and bowler hat. It is a projection o f Billops’ concerns about
being once again, placed in the role o f mother. Will she be able to perform the role
adequately? Billops mouth movements in the audition are out o f sync with the
soundtrack. Distressed, she tries to catch up, to make up for the twenty years lost.
She eventually suceeds, both in the audition and at the close o f the film. The role
play here is also one o f reversal. Billops is presented as the child, with a Shirley
Temple dress, and Christa wears the trappings o f patriarchal power. This is, in fact,
the first time we see Christa as an adult, and it is she who is in control. The film
once again reveals familial roles not as natural but as performative.
As rhetorical devices, Billop’s uses photographs to ja r memory, home
movies, interviews with family members, childhood friends; Christa’s adoptive
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family, the mother Margaret Liebig and her biological children, direct address by
people involved with Billops, cinema verite, and surreal staged moments to reveal
Billops’ reasoning —she internalized Hollywood’s and society’s value o f a
heterosexual two-parent family. “I knew I wasn’t going to have that (Christa’s father
was not interested in parenthood or marriage, abandoning his fiance). If you were a
single parent, you were an unwed mother, and that was close to being a whore...at 27
I knew I wasn’t a very good mother.” Billops reveals idealized family as a facade.
The images o f baby-showers, baptisms, and other celebrated family events o f the
home movies, very self-reflexive, are undermined by voice-overs that provide
counterpoint to the seemingly happy footage. Billops shows us that her choice,
presented as a frightful, difficult, and painful decision, was an act o f survival and
liberation - a release from domestic entrapment that allowed Billops to pursue a life
o f independence and creativity. As Jim Lane explains, Finding Christa is a
seemingly straightforward presentation, but involves a highly complicated
interpretation that is linked to the filmmaker’s personal reactions (1996).
The film presents transformations that occur through time because o f certain
sequential events that take place in the filmmakers personal history, reconstructed
through the films narratives and testimonies. So, in some sense the film is true to the
past. But the narrative structure foes beyond a simple attempt to present personal
history as made up o f uncomplicated time relations. In fact, the film, which has a
running time o f 60 minutes, contains approximately only 20 minutes o f actual
documentary footage. Most o f the film consists o f reenactment o f staged scenes.
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Because the film does not provide any clues to distinguish the actual time line - it
seems to take place in that perpetual present common in motion pictures. We are
never told what year it is, even when the two adult women meet for the first time. As
it happens, the actual reunion took place over ten years before the actual film! (If we
look back to the credit sequence of Suzanne Suzanne, w e are informed that Christa
Victoria wrote and performed the theme song for the film.
Despite this manipulation o f linear time, the use o f staged sequences, fantasy scenes,
Finding Christa does make truth claims. And, this film, like all documentary, as
Grant states, “is a representative of a form o f cinema that is most closely bound to
the real world, to actual personal and collective problems, hopes, and struggles”
1998, 20).
Billops has taken bold steps in her work, challenging a culture that has
has always been resistant to anything that would allow wom en the chance to function
outside the domestic sphere, in any roles other than that o f wife and mother. She
deconstructs the myth o f women’s natural propensity for motherhood and the
idealization o f the nuclear family. By fashioning her work nontraditionally,
experimenting with form and structure, her films provide a wonderful example of
what Eakin describes as the more fundamental paradox o f referential art - the
simultaneous acceptance and refusal, o f the constraints o f the real.
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. Though all o f Billop’s films, except Take Your Bags, lists both her and her
husband James Hatch as the directors, Billops has stated that the films are her
visions, and he provides secondary support (Jones, 1994).
2. See Smith (1992), Minh-ha (1993), Lane (1996), and Bernstein (1998).
3. See M iriam (1982).
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE COLOR COMPLEX
If you’re white, you’re all right.
If you’re yellow, then you’re mellow.
If you’re brown, stick around.
I f you’re black, get back!
(Anonymous)
This little poem, widely circulated for generations in the United States, often
as a children’s rhyme, clearly demonstrates the racial hierarchy at work (Weathers
1991, Sandler 1994; Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992). It could be read as a diagram
for the ethnic scale, the ranking o f racial groupings in America; White Americans at
the pinnacle, followed by Yellow (Asian Americans), Brown ( Latina/o Americans),
and finally Black Americans, whom everyone is taught to despise. (O f course,
notably missing are Native Americans). Those unfamiliar with the verse might
assume that it is prevalent in racist White communities, but it is not. It is a poem that
most Black Americans are taught o f as children. Most Whites have no consciousness
o f the way in which Eurocentric ideals o f attractiveness have been internalized by
people o f color. Motivated by the need to look their best, it is not uncommon for
many Asians and Asian American women undergo plastic surgery to have folds o f
skin removed from their eyelids to make their eyes appear wider and have their noses
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altered to increase their extension. Some Blacks seek the same professionals to have
their noses made more narrow or lips made thinner. For Blacks, this pigmentocracy,
defined by skin color and hair texture, as well as facial features, affects all members
o f the community, but “compared to Black males, Black females have been more
profoundly affected”(Ashe 1995, 579). This is illustrated by the subject’s recurrence
in Black women’s literature —Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eves Were Watching God
(1937), The Bluest Eve (1970) and Song o f Solomon (19771. both by Toni Morrison.
It is also a frequent motif in Black women’s filmmaking. In this chapter I examine
Ayoka Chenzira’s animated short Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People
(1985), Lockin’ Up (1997), an experimental film by T. Nicole Atkinson, and the
documentary A Question o f Color by Kathe Sandler (1991), three films with distinct
styles and approaches that teach us to love Blackness in all forms.
The color complex, as defined by Russell, Wilson, and Hall, emerged in the
United States during the centuries-long period o f enslavement. White men were
permitted not only sexual relations with Black women, but were able to rape Black
women with impunity. Because o f their parentage, mulattoes, the bi-racial children
resulting from these unions, were often treated differently from those bom o f
enslaved Black men and women. Slave owners would sometimes acknowledge their
paternity by removing the mulattoes, still held in bondage1, from the arduous labor o f
the fields, assigning them to the house to perform such duties as food preparation,
housekeeping, and taking care o f White children; often providing the mulattoes with
better clothing, housing, and other amenities. In the North, it was not uncommon for
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mulattoes to receive educations, vocational training, emancipation, and even help
starting businesses. Slavery had created a three-tiered social system, with Mulattoes
as the buffer class, whose presence facilitated relations between Whites and darker
Blacks, especially in areas where the Black population outnumbered Whites.
After the Civil War and emancipation, the mulatto elite no longer had the
distinction o f being separate from other Blacks. Many suffered loss o f property,
businesses, and wealth. They also had to contend with a backlash from Whites who
were now their competitors for employment. Because some were recipients o f
education and trade skills, they were at a distinct advantage over those with darker
complexions. In an effort to preserve their status, they began to segregate themselves
from the Black community, actively discriminating against them. As scholars have
noted, they laid the foundation for the emerging Black middle class (Okazawa-Rey,
Robinson, & Ward and Russell, Wilson, & Hall 1992). Further, they note that this
lighter-skinned class functioned as an aristocracy, forming exclusive blue-vein
organizations (The member’s skin was expected to be light enough so that the veins
were visible), socializing only with each other. In order to gain entry to the social
clubs and certain Black universities, applicants were sometimes expected to produce
proof o f genealogy, or were subjected to either the paper bag or comb test. The paper
bag test required the applicant to expose his or her arm, and the skin tone was
compared to the bag. The comb test involved passing a comb through his or her hair.
If the comb could not be run easily through the hair, the subject failed. In only a few
generations, the lighter-skinned Blacks became the economic, political, and
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intellectual elite o f the Black community2.
These attitudes did not go unchallenged. Marcus Garvey and his Universal
Negro Improvement Association, started in Jamaica in 1914, appealed to racial pride,
celebrating African history and culture. During the late teens and early 1920's, skin
bleaching products began to flood the market, aimed at dark-skinned Blacks seeking
what had now become a status symbol, lighter skin. Garvey refused to publish
advertisements for these products in his newspaper, Negro W orld. In the late 1960's
and early 1970's, a resurgence o f Black nationalism inspired the Black is beautiful
movement. A renewed appreciation o f Blackness, in all forms o f culture, including
beauty ideals, occurred. Youth cultures, linking politics with style, wore urban
guerilla gear, linking the Black American struggle with liberation revolutions around
the world. African inspired dashikis and head raps became all the rage, as well did
the Afro. In the 1980's the Afrocentrism movement emerged, once again in an
attempt to reassert the centrality o f Black and African culture. The ebb and flow o f
these movements proves the pertinence o f the issues as argued in the work o f Black
women media artists, despite the assertion that Brumberg makes in her book The
Body Project (1997), that colorism is no longer a problem. A recent study by Bond
and Cash (1992) revealed that 36% o f the subjects surveyed, Black female college
students, still want to have lighter skin.
Like skin color, hair has also been used as a way to determine levels o f
attractiveness. More than just an aesthetic practice o f personal grooming, woven into
it are connotative meanings o f emotional, political, and economic significance. This
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is not unique to American culture, as hair is used as a symbol in various religions
such as Buddhism and Rastafarianism. What is unique about it in the United States
is its relation to race.
According to Grayson, though Blacks make up only 12% o f the population,
they purchase more than 36% o f hair products, spending on average 46$ per person,
compared with 16% per capita for the general population (1995). Much o f this
consumption, which feeds the multibillion dollar industry, is in an effort to change
the course texture common o f Black hair to attain the texture associated with White
hair. Money is spent on weaves (a lengthening process where artificial or natural
hair is glued to existing hair), wigs, and chemical products known as relaxers,
designed to straighten tight curls. Though the chemical relaxers are used by women
of all racial groups, they are specifically marketed to Black women —print
advertisements are published only in Black magazines and newspapers, television
commercials are aired or cablecast regularly during programs with a Black
demographic or on BET (Black Entertainment Television), and the products
themselves are packaged with images o f smiling Black women with long, shiny,
silky hair.
This might seem like merely a cosmetic issue, but it effects Black women in
numerous ways. As Naomi W olf argues, the beauty myth sets up an ideal that can
never be attained, affecting women psychologically and physically, sometimes even
to the point o f mutilation and death (1991). For Black women it is problematized,
for they can never attain a model based on Whiteness. In addition, these standards
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directly effect levels o f education, employment, familial relations, and choice o f life
partners (Russell, Wilson, and Hall 1992). Those with lighter skin, smoother hair
texture, commonly referred to as good hair, are often treated differently than those
with darker skin, both within and outside the Black community.
It is ironic that the very characteristics associated with Blacks, considered
ugly and used as fodder for jokes, are valued when present in White women, namely
fuller lips and darker skin. Many thin-lipped White women make regular trips to
plastic surgeons to receive collagen injections, temporarily swelling their lips to
larger proportions, and spend in an inordinate amount o f money supporting an entire
industry to obtain tans, at the risk o f skin cancer. They can appropriate the sexuality
stereotyped on to black women, hence becoming more attractive, without having to
take on the identity of Blackness itself. This was shown in 1979, when in the film
10. the object o f desire, played by Bo Derek, had a hairstyle that had been worn by
Black women for centimes. Com rows, or braids, suddenly became chic! Yet when
worn by Black women, such as a Marriott employee, it became grounds for
dismissal. (Her hairstyle was deemed unprofessional). More recently, junior high
school students in a Chicago suburb were threatened with expulsion because their
hairstyle was banned. The school’s superintendent claimed they (the school board)
wanted to ensure that kids were not trying to mimic gangs. This was done despite the
fact that there was, and is, no connection between criminal behavior and hairstyle.
The suburban school board, like other institutions, see these African inspired
hairstyles as threatening assertions o f Blackness.
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Because film usually reinforces and reflects the status quo, the color complex
is readily apparent. Bogle, for example, noted that Griffith’s Birth o f a Nation was
the first film to divide his Black female characters by their individual colors, darker
women for mammies and lighter women for jezebels. This continued through the
entire history o f film. In the race films o f the silent era villains were played by
darker actors and heroes by lighter ones. During the Hollywood studio era the light
skinned women like Lena Home, Fredi Washington, and Dorothy Dandridge3 worked
in roles different from actresses like Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Butterfly
McQueen. We can even see today that the public, and industry, prefers Black
actresses who are closer to the ideal o f White beauty, such as Haile Beny, Vanessa
Williams, and Leia Rochon. While they are able to obtain roles in dramatic or
romantic films, their darker sisters are relegated to the realms o f comedy or Black
urban crime films. A film I like to use in class, that works well as an example, is
Boomerang (1992) directed by Reginald Hudlin.
In the film, Eddie Murphy stars as Marcus, an advertising executive who has
been a chronic womanizer his entire adult life. His agency hires a woman named
Jacqueline, played by Robin Givens, to be his superior, thereby causing the
breakdown o f equilibrium that the narrative will restore.4 The title refers to the
gender reversal his character experiences, for Jacqueline is given all the stereotyped
behaviors associated with men and romantic relations. She values Marcus only for
sexual pleasure, discusses their sexual activities with her friends, and avoids
commitment. As the object o f his (and the audience’s) desire, she fits the ideal of the
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color complex - light skin and long hair. Throughout the film Marcus tries to avoid
another woman, Strange, the fashion model who will star in one o f his company’s
advertising campaigns. This character is indeed, strange, as her name implies, and
she is associated with primitivism. She makes her first appearance in the film at a
celebratory cocktail party thrown by the advertising company. In the scene, we see
an approaching helicopter in the night sky. Attached to it, by a cable, is a large crate.
When the helicopter reaches the balcony where the party is taking place, the cable
detaches and the helicopter leaves. The onlookers, safe behind a wall o f glass, watch
as the crate hits the balcony. Anxious, they eagerly await the revealing o f its
contents. This scene is reminiscent o f the films in the King Kong, Mighty Joe Young
mode, where a fierce jungle creature is brought to the civilized world for the wonder
and entertainment o f audiences. After a brief second o f silence, a scream is heard
and the front o f the crate crashes open. A team o f muscular White men, pulling a
chariot adorned with gazelle antlers (linking it to Africa) emerges, urged forward by
the whip wielding Strange, played by Grace Jones. This film constructs the dark
complexioned Black woman as Other, and eventually rejects the character played by
o f Jacqueline as well. She is too powerful and too masculine, dressing in suits and
assuming male gender role behavior. Instead, the protagonist ends up with the more
acceptable woman, Anglea, played by Halle Berry. Angela conforms to the colorized
beauty standard, and even more so', to the standards o f femininity. She dresses in
clothes with softer lines and takes on a career as a nurturer, an art teacher for young
children. The films I discuss below, take a different perspective.
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Hair Piece
Ayoka Chenzira’s Hair Piece is a hilarious animated short that communicates
its message in the form of satire. Using songs from Black popular culture performed
by artists such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Michael Jackson, as well as
clever narration, it provides a funny, but poignant critique o f America’s beauty
culture and the role o f media in it. Chenzira presents the devastating effect it has had
not only on Black women, but on Black girls as well.
We are introduced to the hair problem with a collage o f Black women’s
pictures, but only o f their faces. Their hair has been cut away. These shots are
accompanied by an aural collage, voices inform o f us that hair is an issue that effects
many aspects o f Black women’s lives: “Girl you better do something about that hair
if you want that job,” “no man wants a bald-headed woman.” We laugh when a
child’s voice exclaims, “Ow, mamma you burnt my head with the hot comb!,” but it
is a bittersweet joke, for it speaks to the pain women have endured to obtain the
beauty ideal. As the narrator introduces the issue at hand, she tells us that for years,
Negro women, Colored women, and Black women have sought to solve the problem,
which as Gibson notes, is significant, for this statement provides historical context,
making us aware o f the still evolving manifestations o f social awareness (1991).
Chenzira then takes us through the various methods that have been employed
by Black women to obtain the ever important “hair that moves in the wind,”
represented by a blond woman on television. She quickly goes through the use of
hair pomades like the popular Royal Crown and Dixie Peach, and even Vaseline, but
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none could guarantee the unwanted appearance o f “turn back hair,” hair when wet
that would revert back to its natural state. A solution was provided by the woman
who, ironically enough, would become the first self-made Black woman millionaire,
Madam C.J. Walker. Walker is credited with innovating the use o f what is
commonly known as the hot comb, a metal comb that when heated, was run through
the hair to straighten it. Though this solution was not permanent, it did not have the
dangerous side effects such as the common practice o f putting lye on the hair. Then
a saving grace was discovered, a product to celebrate: relaxer. Chenzira highlights
this point with the use o f bold colors and star effects and on the soundtrack, with
oratory delivered like a sermon. Hallelujah!, “Black women did not have to wait for a
hurricane so their hair could blow in the wind!" Black women were now considered
attractive enough to pictured in the media as glamourous —the same television where
the W hite woman was shown is presented again, this time with a long-haired Black
woman. The film closes with the introduction o f the Black is Beautiful movement,
when for the first time in a long while, Black women were able to see that “our hair
has a natural beauty all its own.” The closing image, a photograph o f a group Black
women, o f varied skin-tone and hair styles, illustrates for the audience the variety of
Black community, and the beauty o f that variety.
Lockin’ Up
T. Nicole Atkinson’s 30-minute video Lockin’ Up takes a different approach
to the issue. Using her own experience as the foundation, she builds a complex, fast-
paced, and entertaining treatise on hair politics. The title refers to her decision to let
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her hair grow into dreadlocks. Like Chenzira’s film, this too starts with a collage,
but here they are a collection o f Atkinson’s baby pictures. As the camera pans over
them, her narration tells us that she hated her dark skin, but despised her hair even
more. The video is as playful with sound as it is with imagery. Her voice-over has
been processed so that we hear not one voice but two, an echo, suggesting to us that
her identity is fragmented. As the video progresses, so too does her consciousness.
When she has come to love her hair, the repeating voice is removed, signifying her
shift to a whole, and healthy self-image.
Editing is crucial in this film, and she uses it in the tradition o f Eisenstein.
Rather than using continuity as the motivation for cuts, Atkinson uses it as a
rhetorical device. In one scene, she intercuts between a Black woman undergoing the
unpleasant chemical relaxation process and shots o f long-haired White women
tossing their hair as they twirl around and around. In another, intertitles interrupt the
testimonies o f Black women who describe their experiences, personal feelings o f
ugliness and shame. One interviewee reminds us once again, that the media is
complicit in the perpetuation o f Eurocentric beauty myths. She was a fan of
Charlie’s Angels, and lamented th fact that she could not have hair like celebrity
Farrah Fawcett Majors, the woman who defined hair in the 1970's. Each intertitle
lists a synonym used to describe the characteristics o f Black hair; thick, hard to
comb, coarse, wooly, kinky, each getting progressively more disparaging until the
final phrase is introduced - bad hair. But, using the precept of conflict, the
negativism is immediately countered by an answer to the problem, Black hair is the
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best hair for dreadlocks.” Though locked hair is vilified in motion pictures,
associated with drug dealers and other malcontents5, Atkinson demonstrates that to
lock one’s hair is a revolutionary act, and should be celebrated.
A Question o f Color
A Question o f Color (19911. directed by Kathe Sandler is an emotionally
powerful documentary that articulates the pain caused by internalized racism. As she
explains to us in the film, she began her eight year interrogation into color
consciousness because o f her own experiences. As an extremely light-skinned Black
woman, light enough to pass for White, she was intrigued by the treatment she
received at home and in public. Her stated goal is to provide the means for Black
people to get a look at the other side, for darker-skinned Blacks to leam o f the
experiences o f lighter-skinned Blacks and for those of lighter complexions to
understand the effects of colorism on those darker than they. By including
interviews w ith a diversity o f age, sex, income, and skin tone, Sandler does indeed
provide the means for understanding, often in poignant ways.
It is distressing to witness the extreme emotional pain as some individuals
confront their memories o f self-doubt and denigration, while others come to grips
with the guilt o f using the color complex to judge others. One such scene takes place
at the kitchen table as a Black family eats their breakfast. Here, an eleven-year-old
boy, admits to his mother, that wishes he could have lighter skin. As they continue
to discuss the issue, asking him if he thinks people like light-skinned people better
than dark-skinned people, the humiliation the culture has heeped on him can be read
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on his downcast and sullen face. He is teased by his older brother, Keyon, who we
later leam has problems o f his own.
An important sequence in the film concerns the teenage Keyon and his best
friend, Keith, who has a very light complexion. When they are together, or with
friends, they claim that color is not an issue with them. Yet when Keyon is alone, we
leam that he resents girls always referring to Keith as “the cute one, the one with
good hair.” As he describes the way it affects his self-esteem, Sandler cuts to a shot
o f Keyon in the bathroom. He is inserting contact lenses to lighten the color o f his
eyes.
As I stated earlier, Sandler wants to look at the issue from both sides, so we
are also presented with the experience o f Black individuals with lighter skin. This is
extremely important, for it raises an issue ignored by the other films that critique
pigmentocracy, the backlash against them by those o f darker hues. Lighter skinned
Blacks are frequently the objects o f scorn by those without the same privileges.
Sandler, and others like her, arc suspect because they aren’t Black enough.
The film end as it began, with shots o f Blacks o f varied hues, each describing
the color o f their skin, “ebony, pecan, cinnamon, light, bright, and damn near White.”
But as we experience the footage again, we find that our attitudes have shifted.
Sandler has forced is to interrogate our own participation in the maintenance o f the
system. As the subjects turn to face the camera, it is as if they are directly challenging
us to take on Sandler’s call for reconciliation, for members o f the Black community
to see and value all hair types and skin tones as attractive.
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As Foucault has demonstrated, and as evidenced by the film discussed here,
the most insidious ways ideology works is its affects is directly on the body
(1979 and 1990). “In a White supremacist, sexist society all women’s values are
devalued, but White women’s bodies are more valued than those o f women o f color”
(hooks 1990, 62). Film and the media industries have facilitated the process o f
internalization begun centuries ago, and perhaps, in the hands o f filmmakers like
Ayoka Chenzira, T.Nicole Atkinson, and Kathe Sandler, it can also work to change
it. These Black women filmmakers remind us that confronting racism and sexism can
take many forms, and that loving Blackness is itself a form o f resistance.
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
1. By law, children inherited the status o f their mother.
2. Russell, Wilson, & Hall point out, o f the group known as the ‘Talented Tenth,
which included not ten but twenty-one individuals, all but one, Phyllis Wheatley
Peters were o f mixed race.
3. This is not to imply that these actresses did not experience racism. Lena Home
was often considered not Black enough and was forced to wear make up to darken
her skin. All o f them were constrained by the type o f roles available.
4. It is a common occurrence in Hollywood film for a woman to be the cause that
sets the narrative in motion.
5. Films clips from The Mighty Quinn. Marked for Death. Thelma and Louise are
used as examples in the video.
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CHAPTER FIVE
IMAGERY FOR ACTION:
CONTEMPORARY MEDIA ACTIVISM
Despite the fact that mainstream venues o f production, distribution, and
exhibition continue to reflect and reinforce dominant ideological hegemonies, vast
changes in production and distribution technologies have resulted in an increased
democratization o f mass media. Faster film stock and lenses reduce the need for
expensive lighting equipment, studios, and sound stages; more affordable cameras
place the power o f image construction in the hands o f the those without access to
employment in the corporate media conglomerates, and inventions like videotape and
new digital technologies make it possible for independent and alternative media
producers to innovate new avenues for distribution and exhibition. As the media
oligarchies continue to grow in size and shrink in number1, these alternative media
forms become even more important in the on-going struggle for minority voices to be
heard within the marketplace of ideas, for as many scholars2 have noted, “the greater
the monopoly o f the communication source over the recipient, the greater the change
or effect in favor o f the source over the recipient” (Fiske and Hartley 1985, 36)
Though many utilize alternative media forms to attempt access into the commercial
marketplace and others as a purely aesthetic exercise, there are media producers who
attempt to use film and video to enact change in the daily lives o f their audiences.
This essay examines the work o f three Black women film and video makers whose
productions, unlike that o f conventional media producers, seek to create a truly
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egalitarian society by challenging the racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic status
quo.
Madeline Anderson, Portia Cobb, and Cyrille Phipps, like their
predecessors in print such as M aria W. Stewart, Mary Shadd Cady, and Ida B. Wells-
Bamett,3 use mass m edia to address fundamental issues impacting the economic,
cultural, and political survival o f Black Americans. As artists producing media
diverse in both style and content, they present new and unique aesthetic visions; and
as media activists working solely in the area o f non-fiction, they do more than just
document the continuing struggle for Civil Rights. They use their talents in their
respective mediums to, as Waugh states, “intervene wherever they have been
challenging the inherited structures o f social domination" (1984, xii).
One o f the earliest Black women film makers who sought to use the medium
o f film for change was Eloyce Patrick Gist, bom in Hitchcock, Texas, in 1892. She
and her husband James, directors o f film dramas in the 1930's, knew that film could
serve as more than entertainment. Gist, “based on her religious faith, believed
cinema could unite Black people, promote Christian values and racial pride, and
communicate a social message” (Gibson 21). Today hundreds o f Black women are
writing, producing, and directing film and video. Though, as I have discussed in
previous chapters, most can be considered activists because they challenge the
exclusionary practices o f Hollywood, freeing Black Americans from the confines of
conventional one-dimensional stereotypes, I focus on Anderson, Cobb, and Phipps
because each is what Thomas Waugh terms “a committed filmmaker, one who not
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only observes, but also participates in socio-political transformation.” Each is “not
only content to interpret the world, but is also engaged in changing it” (Waugh 14).
As noted previously, the dominant mass media forms have traditionally either
rendered Black people invisible or constructed them in stereotypical ways. These
depictions have not gone unchallenged, for the Black press and Black-produced
media in general, have historically provided opposition - serving as an advocacy tool
in the struggle for civil and human rights. This tradition, beginning in 1827 with
Freedom’s Journal, the anti-slavery newspaper started by Samuel Cornish and John
Russwurm, continues today with over 3,000 publications that remain active towards
social change. A s mass communications expanded to include the aural and visual
mediums o f radio, motion pictures, and video, so too have the efforts o f Black
Americans.
To counter the racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia of mainstream
media, contemporary Black women have chosen to work in the mediums o f film and
video to give voice to a discourse based in their reality, from their perspective. As
documentary film maker Michelle Parkerson states:
Traditionally used to mutilate and stereotype, mass media has been
killing women and people o f color for some time. But the independent
film community, particularly Black independent film and video makers,
create w ith an understanding that film and video no longer serve as
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mere entertainment in these dangerous times. We use film and video to
validate our herstory and experiences, where before there was only
distortion. (1987).
In their development o f a counter-cinema, film and video makers like Anderson,
Cobb, and Phipps actively challenge the Hollywood conventions, in form as well as
content. Rather than fictionalizing the history and concerns o f the community, these
artists/activists choose to remain grounded in the reality o f people’s lives and lived
experience - with documentary, and they do so fully aware o f the ideological
underpinnings o f traditional documentary form as well.
Madeline Anderson -
“The thing I want to do most in film is record the black experience.”
Madeline Anderson is a pioneer o f Black cinema and television and one of
the most important media producers/directors o f the 1970's. Julie Dash, director o f
the film Daughter’s o f the Dust, considers Anderson a major influence. Anderson’s
awards include her selection as Woman o f the Year in 1976 at the Sojourner Truth
Festival o f the Arts, an Indie Award for Life Long Achievements and Contributor to
the Art o f Film from the Association o f Independent Film and Video Makers in
1985, and induction into the Miller Gallery o f Greats in 1991. Anderson was
inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall o f Fame in 1992. Like most Americans,
Anderson grew up with the movies, but her exposure inspired her to become a
filmmaker. “I went [to the movies] every Saturday with m y brother and our friends.
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We packed a lunch and stayed all day... The films we saw didn’t reflect who we
were. Even then I wanted to see us in films” (Moon, 27).
While attending New York University as a psychology major, Anderson was
introduced to filmmaking by working as an apprentice with renown documentarists
Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker4. Her first film was produced in 1961,
Integration Report i , a short film about the year o f the nation’s first Civil Rights Sit-
Ins. Wanting to learn more about the technical aspects o f film production, Anderson
began to work on films by others. From 1962-1964 she worked as an assistant
director and assistant editor on Shirley Clarke’s film The Cool World5, and with
WNET in New York from 1964-1969, where Anderson applied her talents as a
writer, associate producer, editor, and director. While with the PBS station,
Anderson also worked on the Emmy-award winning program Black Journal, a
groundbreaking series which investigated and presented controversial issues from
varied perspectives. When she left WNET in 1969, it was to work on her most
acclaimed film, I Am Somebody.
Produced, directed, and edited by Anderson, I Am Somebody documents the
strike o f Black workers against the hospitals o f Charleston, South Carolina in 1969.
Because o f pay inequity, inhumane treatment, and the lack o f grievance procedures,
the Black women hospital workers began to organize, forming a union - Local
1119B. When 12 women were fired from their jobs, 400 others went on a strike that
was to last over one hundred days. The movement for a livable wage and respect on
the job expanded into a large-scale Civil Rights protest. Rallies and daily marches
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were held and a boycott ensued, costing the local economy over $15 million dollars
in revenue loss; hundreds o f National Guard troops and state police were called in,
and as expected, many people were arrested, more than one thousand in fact,
including Ralph Abernathy. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived,
as did the Chair o f the Organizing Committee o f Hospital and Nursing Home
Employees, Coretta Scott King. In addition, as Phillip Foner notes, “the national
heads o f nine civil rights organizations and five elected black officials issued a joint
statement in support o f the strike. It was the first time black leaders had come
together on a single issue since [Martin Luther] King’s death” (442). An important
document o f the Civil Rights movement, Anderson’s film gives testimony to the
Movement as a grassroots struggle and highlights the often forgotten contributions
that women made to the struggle.
According to Foner, in 1969, “Charleston was a most unlikely site for a major
unionizing drive among black hospital workers. A booming tourist trade and
convention business attested to the city’s appeal, but life was harsh for its working
class, especially for the Black workers. Charleston was one o f the few large
Southern cities that had not been touched by the Civil Rights Movement” (440).
Anderson deftly depicts the unique situation in the opening o f the film. The images
introducing the city are like picturesque postcards; scenic landscapes, tour boats to
Ft. Sumter, old Southern mansions, and horse-drawn buggies. This tourist gaze is
abruptly interrupted when, as the narrator explains, ‘T hose who came in the spring o f
1969 saw Charleston as it really was if you’re poor and black.” Anderson
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immediately cuts to a shot o f the protestors’ feet, marching for economic and social
justice. It is important to note that those in protest move from left to right, while in
the shots that precede it, the horse-drawn buggy moves right to left. By juxtaposing
these shots, Anderson, with this powerful imagery, creates a metaphor for the events
- movement away from tradition and racist discrimination. But it will be a long and
tedious process, and this is underscored by the music, a subdued, slow-paced
instrumental o f the Civil Rights anthem “W e Shall Overcome.”
An important aspect o f I Am Somebody is the focus it places on strike
participants. Several well-known leaders o f the Civil Rights Movement are
presented in the film; Ralph Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young,
were all in leadership roles, yet it is the average citizens who are interviewed:
striking hospital workers, protesting high school students, and townspeople
supportive o f the cause. Rather than being shown as powerless victims, those
interviewed give testimony to their experiences, frustrations, and anger. Anderson
provides a space where they can be heard.
The film presents varying aspects o f the protest, yet throughout we are made
aware o f the constant danger posed by Charleston’s power structure. The sequences
o f speeches, press conferences, and interviews are all punctuated by shots which
powerfully communicate the intensity o f events and the threat o f potential violence.
Rather than speaking with individual protestors, police officers are shown
communicating with the protestors by broadcasting orders with the use o f bullhorns.
Their menacing presence is enhanced by that o f the military, called in to help restore
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order. Rifles drawn, the soldiers dominate the frame as they do the protestors,
presenting an intimidating force against the unarmed men, women, and children.
Charleston is depicted as it was - a city under siege. At one point in the film, the
potential for violence is realized when the picketers are subjected to brutal truncheon
blows from the police. Shot in cinema verite style, the sequence cinematically
mirrors the mayhem and confusion, recorded by a hand-held camera within the fray.
Because I Am Somebody is document o f a social protest organized by Black
women, it speaks directly not only to issues o f racism, but sexism as well. The
majority o f the hospital workers, like others in the service industry, were not only
women, but Black women. The protest, which began as a fight for a livable wage
and respect on the job, erupted when the Black women became increasingly angry
because the efforts o f their labor resulted in less pay than that earned by White men,
Black men, and White women. As stated in an excerpt from the speech delivered by
Coretta Scott King at the Morris Brown A.M.E. Church in the film, “the Black
working woman is the most discriminated against o f all working women.”
Within the film, many women speak o f the sacrifice required for them to
remain on the picket lines, and much o f that sacrifice involved the private sphere.
Financial hardship ensued, as did strained relationships with their families. In a
telling interview o f a striking hospital worker and her husband, the woman speaks of
the decreased time spent with her children and the difficulty o f completing household
chores while participating in the public protest. And though her husband supports
her efforts for social and economic justice, he does so unenthusiastically because of
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the effects upon the household.
Anderson provides viewers with a woman’s perspective through her use of
camera work and editing, and with the structuring voice that carries the audience
through the film. Rather than using the traditional documentary voice-of-god
approach, where an omnipotent, unseen male narrator explains and interprets the
images, the film is narrated in the first person by a woman participant. Thus we get a
very personalized approach, revealing details, thoughts, doubts, fears, and
frustrations. This narration does more than just lead us through the film, for as the
consciousness o f the narrator is raised, so is ours. In making the film, Anderson
wanted to document the Movement. She felt it important to record the Black
experience because, after all, as she puts it:
If we don’t do it, no one else will. Whenever any kind o f exciting
event happened that would help the younger people know their
heritage and get a sense o f the struggle, I would attempt to film it.
So when the hospital workers started to form their own union in South
Carolina, it was a very exciting thing. Here were Black women saying,
‘W e want a union...we don’t want to be treated like dirt anymore; we
want to be treated like human beings.’ Also there was something else
historically important about it: It was the first time in a long time that
the Civil Rights movement and labor had formed an alliance, and that
was exciting. So for those reasons I thought this had to be recorded.
(Franklin 6).
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Anderson did more than just record the strike for posterity. At the film’s
close, reflecting on the events that have transpired, the narrator says, “If I didn’t learn
but one thing, that if you are willing to stand up and fight for yourself, others will be
ready to fight for you.” The film remains relevant today, decades later, because it
also serves as a testimony to the power of collective action. But the film must do
more than just speak to collective action. As Kleinhans notes, “radical
film/videomakers today, if they are to make genuinely liberating work, films and
tapes that contribute to fundamental change must examine their own taken-for-
granted ideas and behavior, about society, about politics, and about their medium and
its techniques” (318).
Many documentaries borrow a convention from the Classical Hollywood
narrative style, the focus on a single protagonist. This is an extremely problematic
approach to narrative when films attempt to present a progressive ideology.
Typically, in a Hollywood style film, the protagonist is a single individual with a
goal or desire. A conflict occurs when the antagonist, usually another individual
possessing an opposing goal, intervenes. Rather than constructing stories where the
social fabric and culture serve as catalysts, events transpire because o f individual
action. This results in a reduction o f the wider social and cultural causes into an
individual’s problem, thereby reducing the issues lose their social significance o f the
issues. Filmmakers such as the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein avoided such a
problem in the 1920's. In films such as Strike (1924), Potempkin (1925), and
October f1927k he constructed narratives in which the Soviet masses are the
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protagonists. And as Kleinhans notes, in most documentaries “emphasis is on the
individual rather than collective” (1984, 325).
I Am Somebody does not follow the traditional form, because even though it
has a single narrator, it never focuses on an individual woman. Anderson presents
several participants rather than using one person to carry us through the narrative as
the protagonist. The memory presented by the narration is thus a collective memory.
The narrator is never identified and so, when watching the film she could be one o f
the women presented, but she can also be every woman..
After completion o f the film, which garnered many national and international
awards, Anderson remained dedicated to effecting social change through media. In
the early 1970's she became an important contributor to the Children’s Television
Network as the supervising editor and an in-house film producer and director for
both Sesame Street and The Electric Company - programs designed to promote
intellectual growth in pre-scholars, particularly disadvantaged, urban children. In
1975 she formed her own company, Onyx Productions, producing a number o f
works, among them the television series, The Infinity Factory. The program,
targeted for inner-city children ages 8-12, instructed them on how to use math for
problem-solving during everyday situations. Broadcast over 256 PBS stations, this
program was the first nationally broadcast television series produced by a Black
woman.
In addition to her work as a film and video artist, Anderson has served as a
part o f the founding management team for WHMM in Washington DC, the only
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African-American owned PBS affiliate, and as a board member on the New York
Film Council and the national distribution company Women Make Movies. And,
when not working as the associate director o f the Office o f Black Ministry in the
Diocese o f Brooklyn, New York, or teaching and lecturing around the country,
Anderson continues to develop, produce, and direct films and television programs.
Portia Cobb - - “As an artist, my method is to re-invent and problem solve.”
Equally talented in the mediums o f film and video, artist Portia Cobb has
taken her experience in film production to the medium o f video, doing what she
calls, “translating and transferring some o f the aesthetic principles discovered in
filmmaking, to the video medium” (Cobb, 1998). By taking optical printing
techniques from film; re-photography, stop-motion, and repetition, to video, Cobb
is, as she explains, “testing and pushing formal visual conventions by layering,
reprocessing, and reinventing.” She began producing experimental videos in 1989
while a resident o f the San Francisco Bay area. Since then, she has received national
and international acclaim. Her works have been exhibited/screened around the
world, including in Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto,
Sanitago, Milan, and Paris.
Rather than producing conventional documentaries, Cobb explores the
possibilities and distinct aesthetic form o f the video medium. Her works, frequently
non-linear in form, are what she describes as mediations. This an apt term, for her
work demonstrates a knowledge and self-awareness about the codes o f documentary
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film and video. Through self-reflexivity, Cobb provides a treatise not only on her
subject matter, but on the process o f mediation itself. One example o f this is her
video No Justice. No Peace, produced in 1992.
On March 3, 1991, a resident o f Los Angeles County, Rodney King, was
brutally beaten by White police officers, members o f a police force sworn to preserve
and protect. The assault and blatant disregard o f civil and human rights shocked the
nation, and indeed the world. But perhaps what I should say is that the attack
shocked White America and those who naively viewed the United States as a nation
where there is, indeed, justice and liberty for all. For the people o f color, it appeared
that the police were conducting business as usual, for police brutality and harassment
is a long-standing and endemic practice in minority communities. Despite the
prevalence o f police brutality across the United States6, no government agency keeps
national records o f what has been demonstrated to be routine dismissal o f the
constitutional rights of American citizens. Given the fact that such incidents occur
all too frequently, what was it about the Rodney King assault that created such a
national uproar? It was the video. The brutalization was captured on a home video
camera by George Holliday. The television news industry was provided with violent,
dramatic footage, and, as they say, what bleeds, leads. The abuse suffered by Rodney
King became the nation’s m ost talked about news story, and the video was broadcast
over, and over, and over again. Portia Cobb examined the beating o f Rodney King
and the media’s treatment o f it, in the video No Justice. No Peace: Young Black Men
Im-MEDIA-te.
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An experimental documentary, the video utilizes interviews, inter-titles, news
footage, and symbolic images to observe, analyze, and critique police brutality and
the m edia’s treatment o f it. The soundtrack is equally complex, consisting o f
overlapping dialogue spoken by Cobb herself, and calls into question the sounds and
images broadcast into the homes o f America.
It opens with the Holliday footage, as we hear the voice-over in a monotone
delivery repeat over and over, “56 times in 81 seconds,” the number o f blows
inflicted on King by the police. These words, accompanying the footage, do not
underscore the image but rather help elicit a stronger reaction to the unmerciful
violence, making it possible for the now overly-familiar images to evoke once more
the feelings o f shock and anger. We are introduced to the theme o f the piece, the
mediation o f the beating, by a phrase introduced at the end of the narrator’s looping
voice over, “56 times in 81 seconds...on video,” and the whisper, “television.”
Cobb intercuts Academy Leader, the strip o f film which usually provides the
backwards countdown to the start o f a motion picture, but here, the numbers are
backward and upside down. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture. One o f
the m ost effective sequences o f the video occurs when we watch the King beating
again, this time with a television broadcaster’s commentary informing the image.
Rather than describing the sickening violence committed or inhumane treatment, he
describes the statements made by the police justifying their actions; that after two
hits from the stun guns, King was trying to get up from the ground and posed a threat
to the officers. When we are shown the video footage o f White truck-driver
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Reginald Denny, beaten by Black youth during the uprising that followed the
acquittal o f the Los Angeles police officers we also hear commentary by a broadcast
journalist. But the descriptions o f events differ. A broadcaster, looking down on the
scene from the news helicopter that videotaped the scene, exclaims in a highly
emotional and agitated state, “this is attempted murder...there is no police presence
here...where are the police?” Cobb then cuts once again to the King beating footage,
repeating from the preceding commentary - “there is no police presence here,”
followed by silence as brutality continues. Perhaps this is what defines police
presence in the Black community. The juxtaposition makes clear the different
treatment attributed to race. M y point here is not to diminish the assault on Denny,
for it too was vicious, but the point Cobb makes is clear - the news media is racist.
Media bias, stereotyping, and its effects on self-worth and identity is shown
very effectively in one shot - o f a young Black boy watching television. Using
superimposition, Cobb shows us the boy, screen right, looking left at a television.
Superimposed on that image, screen left, is a larger close-up o f his face. And on top
of that is the television set itself, placed “in his head,” where his forehead would be.
The image on the television set is o f an incarcerated Black man. Through this
layering, with one shot, the video maker deftly communicates the influence o f racist
media depictions. The television does, as Bernard Shaw, news anchor for CNN
states, “have a responsibility for the white fear o f black men” - the quote upon which
the video closes.
Even as Cobb comments on mediated reality, she also informs us that she is
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aware that by constructing the video, she too is mediating reality. This is most
apparent during the interviews. Cobb presents five young Black men who, given
their age, are more likely than any other group to be victims o f brutality. Asked to
speak o f the experience o f Black men in America, they theorize about causes of
racism, describe their reactions to the King beating, recount their own experiences
with police harassment, and the power o f television in the formation o f racist
ideology and self-esteem. As varied as the participants themselves, the interviews
are similar in that Cobb uses electronic effects such as polarization and skipped-
frame advance as self-reflexive techniques, reminding us that we are not watching
privileged and objective truths.
No Justice. No Peace is an effective educational tool on media literacy. Cobb
expands her role as a media educator and activist beyond the confines o f the screen at
the University o f Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a member o f the School of
Fine Arts faculty. She also serves the community as the artistic director o f the
University o f Wisconsin Community Media Project (CMP). The CMP is an outreach
program that offers film and video production workshops for city residents, free o f
charge. Instructors in the workshops teach creative, critical, practical, and social
skills, and much o f its success has been with the youth. In 1991 the organization
innovated a program to work with at-risk youth. Teens who have learned to operate
video and 16mm film cameras conceptualize and create their own projects, under
leadership provided by Cobb. The result? Three broadcast-length documentaries
that have won national awards. As artists, the young people have used the video
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medium to celebrate their culture, record their dreams and aspirations, and to create
video poetry. But they also use the medium for advocacy. The video Signs o f the
Times, for example, produced by children ages 7-18 residing in the mid-town
Housing Association, examines the availability o f alcohol in their community and the
prevalence o f billboards advertising alcoholic beverages. They have presented their
work at schools, universities, and conferences; have attended film festivals, and have
represented the city o f Milwaukee and the state o f Wisconsin at a nationally
broadcast youth forum.
Cyrille Phipps and Not Channel Zero - the Revolution Televised - -
“The camcorder is revolutionary.”
Media artist Cyrille Phipps has been instrumental in providing a televised
voice o f the Black community to the city o f New York through her production and
media education workshops. A graduate o f Syracuse University’s School o f Visual
and Performing Arts, Phipps has been recognized by the New York Foundation for
the Arts, The National Black Programming Association, and the Black Filmmakers
Hall o f Fame. She is co-founder o f Black Planet Productions, a collective o f
camcorder activists who produced Not Channel Zero, a grassroots alternative media
news and cultural show for public access cable in New York. Their program has been
cablecast as well in Arizona, Maryland, Connecticut, Colorado, and California. By
producing the program as a collective, Not Channel Zero challenges the social
relations o f production, rejecting the hierarchical structure o f the mainstream media
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industries. Its aim was to educate the public about issues ignored by the mainstream
media that affect the black community. It was founded in 1989 by three experienced
media producers: videographer Tom Poole; Cyrille Phipps, a media educator in New
York high schools; and George Sosa, a video instructor at Rise and Shine
Productions. Other members included Jacqueline Dolly, Joan Baker, Mark Albert,
Donna Golden, Art Jones, Michele McKenzie, Tracey Williamson, Donna Murch,
and Nzingha Clarke. Their Ten Point Plan:
1. To provide a forum for the education o f the Black community,
promoting a cultural connection among all people o f the African Diaspora.
2. To promote political, social, and economic empowerment.
3. To act as a forum to discuss issues and evaluate problems.
4. To locate and provide resources that will develop problem-solving
techniques.
5. To acknowledge the cultural contributions o f Africans in the United States
and abroad.
6. To provide a provocative alternative to mainstream media.
7. To reflect the concerns o f our community and provide an outlet for their
grievances.
8. To celebrate and honor the memory o f our African ancestors.
9. To act as a creative venue for emerging artists.
10. To provide a positive and respectful analysis o f the Black
community.
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Using their cameras as weapons to wage a revolution, the group attacked
issues as wide ranging as the Clarence Thomas hearings, protests against the Gulf
War, sexism against Black women, and homophobia in the Black community. In the
video Doing What It Takes: Black Folks Getting and Staving Healthy they targeted
the health care crisis experienced in the Black community.
According to Reed, Dority, and Roberson, “Blacks not only do not live as
long as whites, they do not live as healthily.”7 Blacks suffer preventable and chronic
diseases at a greater rate than most o f the other races in the United States.
Hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is 30% higher in Blacks than in
Whites. Its complications; congestive heart failure, stroke, and end stage renal
distress are also more common. They have the highest cancer incident rates and the
highest cancer mortality rates; infant mortality rates o f Black Americans out paces
that in most Third World countries, and the rate o f AIDS is more than three times
that o f whites (Reed, Darity, & Roberson 1990; Bong 1993, Blocker 1993). As
noted in the video, the health issue is complex, often tied to high rates o f under- and
unemployment and the lack o f health insurance. When access to the health care
system is provided, Black Americans who seek adequate health care often experience
institutional racism from the system. In addition, high rates o f poverty make it
difficult to maintain proper nutrition. Blocker states that, “In general, Black
Americans living in or near poverty consume diets that are marginal in vitamins A,
D, E, B-complex, C, calcium, magnesium, iron and zinc...The diets are also low in
foods that are good sources o f carbohydrates and dietary fiber” (269).
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Like the other works produced by Not Channel Zero, Doing What It Takes
presents an innovative media news/cultural affairs program that incorporates the
information and analysis o f m ost public affairs programs, but it does so without the
staid, static studio atmosphere and without the usual cast o f experts. Though the
documentary includes medical and health professionals, the experts focused upon in
this video are those with lived experience, the community. The form in which the
people and issues are presented can be described as the music video approach— fast,
hip, and highly stylized. According to co-founder Cyrille Phipps, “NCZ gives us an
opportunity to be creative, and there is not much being done by people o f color from
a purely grassroots perspective” (as quoted by Parris, p. 40).
Once we are introduced to the subject matter, it is the people o f Brooklyn,
NY who lead us through the issue. The video contains no authoritative narration, no
added music to try and affect the audience’s thinking process with heightened
emotion, and no intertitles to explain and interpret the sounds and images. It
effectively presents various arguments about holistic health care and the medical
establishment by allowing the community to share its knowledge and opinions, while
leaving the members of the audience to come to their own conclusions. Rather than
being talked at, the audience is talked to. Through the editing and use o f direct
address, several o f the participants speak directly to the camera, the video presented
is a conversation. And like Cobb’s No Justice. No Peace. Julie Dash’s Illusions, and
Camille Billops’ Finding Christa, this video is also self-reflexive in that the audience
is permitted to hear the questions asked. We are aware o f the process o f
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construction.
Fast paced, in only 30 minutes Doing What It Takes covers a wide range o f
topics: nutrition and diet, self-medication with the use o f herbs and home remedies,
meditation, overuse o f drugs by the established medical system, institutionalized
health care, and lifestyle choices. Not Channel Zero takes the issue beyond the
personal by including discussion on the politics o f health care: the lack of health
insurance and the lack o f access, poverty, the need for information and education, the
dependence on a capitalist medical system driven not by care but by profit, and the
proliferation of fast food establishments in their neighborhoods coupled with the
shortage o f grocery and health food stores. As stated in the video, health care, like
all crises affecting the Black community, is an issue o f empowerment. In order to
take control o f our lives, we must take care o f our bodies.
Phipps expanded her efforts in the field o f democratic media in 1992 by
working as co-distribution coordinator for Paper Tiger Television, another non
commercial video collective that challenged the ideology of mainstream media. She
continued in the position, and with Not Channel Zero, until 1995, when she became
the executive producer for Dyke TV. Currently she works for the Education and
Outreach department at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the largest public access
facility in the United States.
Madeline Anderson, Portia Cobb, and Cyrille Phipps are all talented artists
who use their chosen media in creative and challenging ways - developing innovative
and unique artistic visions. But, as I have argued, they are also media activists who
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are working toward progressive change. As producers and directors o f documentary
film and video, they observe the culture and create records o f life within a racist,
sexist, classist, and homophobic society. But they do more. As an important part o f
the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, these women and many other media producers
work to forge a society where the individual humanity o f all is recognized, where
civil and human rights are respected, ensured, and celebrated.
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ENDNOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
1. Examples include the acquisition o f the ABC television network and the film
distribution company Miramax by the Disney Corporation; the enormous holdings of
Time-Warner, which includes film production, distribution, cable television
networks, and publishing houses; and the more recent merger o f Viacom and CBS, a
move which put the television network, cable channels like MTV and VH1, and
Blockbuster Video, one o f the nation’s largest video retail outlets, under one roof.
2. Critics of the media as industry include Schiller 1973 and 1976, Parenti 1986,
Herman & Chomsky 1988, Gerbner et a ll996, and Bagdikian 1997.
3. For more information on the groundbreaking work o f these women, see
Streitmatter 1994 and Wells 1985.
4. Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker are filmmakers who took advantage o f
technological advances such as smaller cameras and faster film stocks in the 1960's.
They, along with filmmakers Robert Drew and Albert Maylses, helped innovate a
new style o f documentary called cinema verite in the 1960's. An observational style,
verite films present recorded events as they transpired, without using reinactments,
interviews, added narration or music.
5. The Cool World is a fictional feature shot in Harlem in 1964 using many non
professional actors. It is often noted as one o f the first fictional films to utilize the
formal style o f cinema verite to add verisimilitude to its drama. Considered
controversial during its release, the film focused on black male homosexuality.
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6. Examples o f brutality exist all across the nation. In June o f 1996, Amnesty
International released a 72-page document, the results o f an investigation o f the New
York City Police Department. In 1997, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf o f 27
plaintiffs against the city o f Pittsburgh, PA. Philadelphia, Tampa, Indianapolis,
Detroit, and Atlanta. These cities and m any more all have several cases o f brutality
now pending in court.
7. The authors quote life expectancy statistics as provide by the 1984 U.S. Census;
white males 72, white females 78.9, black males 65.1, and black females 73.8 (p. 7).
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CONCLUSION
When I was a child, voraciously consuming film and television, I looked
forward to my weekly doses o f the WASPy 1970's family sitcoms The Bradv Bunch
and The Partridge Family, something very hard to admit! I would repeatedly wonder
why no one on television looked like me. At least later there were the teenage
daughter Thelma, played by Bernadette Stanis, and her younger neighbor Penny,
played by Janet Jackson, on Goodtimes. one o f the few television programs that
featured a Black family. But where were the Black female teenagers during the
resurgence o f the teen films o f the 1980's? Not much has changed since that time.
Shows featuring teens on television, currently great in number, are so segregated that
Fox’ television’s comedy show Mad TV was able to spoof them, calling their parody
program “Pretty White Kids with Problems.” Ensemble adult dramas on television
define diversity as Black men and White women. Hollywood feature films are no
better. Mainstream motion pictures with Black women as protagonists are rare, and
those focusing on Black girls practically nonexistent. As I have discussed in this
study, when Black females are present in mainstream m edia they are usually
degraded or marginalized. As an alternative, independent Black women film and
videomakers, have been working for decades outside the confines o f formulaic
commercial media, producing works that function as counter-cinema. They offer us
Black women and girls as subjects not objects, while at the same time avoiding what
Wollen (1972) describes as the “seven deadly sins o f cinema:” 1) narrative
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transitivity, linear cause and effect, 2) identification, emotional involvement with a
character, 3) transparency, effacing the means o f production, 4) the single diegesis,
the separation between the film world and the real one, 5) closure, 6) pleasure
through entertainment, and 7) the retreat from the real. Instead o f relying on the
conventional formulas and conservative politics o f Hollywood narrative form, Black
women film and video makers communicate emancipatory ideologies through self-
reflexivity, obstructing passive pleasure through complex cinematic forms. Bringing
unique artistic styles and visions to the media o f moving images, through their work
these women redress the all too common one dimensional stereotypes o f Black
people in commercial film and television. They retrieve and authenticate Black
women’s history and experiences, celebrate Black culture, and by their construction
o f Black female subjectivity, empower those struggling against the culture’s
intersecting racist and sexist hegemonies.
In this study, I have used close textual analysis to argue that their work uses
the distinct elements o f cinema to construct discourses that serve as revolutionary
tools resisting sexist and racist domination. I started my discussion with the
ideological strategies o f the classical Hollywood narrative, its construction of race
and the politics o f its structure so that I could demonstrate the alternative operations
o f independent Black women’s cinema, using Julie Dash’s film Illusions as an
example. This complex period film interrogated the history of Hollywood film, the
industry’s production practices, and the racism inherent in them. Her rejection of
Hollywood is articulated in her rejection o f its style, here, in this film, and in all her
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works that followed, most notably the ground-breaking feature Daughters o f the Dust
(1991). I explored the emergence o f a new genre in chapter two, the Civil Rights
drama. The characteristic elements delineated - the displacement o f contemporary
problems, the characterizations o f Black people as victims and White people as
protagonists —demonstrate the problem o f Hollywood’s exclusionary practices as
highlighted by Illusions in chapter one. Black woman filmmaker, Beverlyn Fray
attempts to cure cultural amnesia concerning women’s participation in the Civil
Rights movement. Her film, The Lone Walk Home confronts Hollywood’s versions
o f history, presenting the struggle as the grass roots movement it was, dependent on
the participation o f everyday citizens rather than solely on the heroism o f White
individuals. Chapter three considered another consequence o f Hollywood’s exclusion
o f Blacks in the industry - the perpetuation o f stereotypes. This chapter focused on
the self-reflective work o f documentary filmmaker Camille Billops, who confronts
the traditional form o f non-fiction film and its false objectivity. She reveals both
herself and the production process in Suzanne Suzanne and Finding Christa, two
films that resist the constraining gender roles that the media has reinforced and
reflected, particularly the archetype o f Black motherhood. Chapter four concerned
m edia’s perpetuation o f another system, what Naomi W olf has termed the beauty
myth. For Black women, the strict definition means physical characteristics based on
Whiteness: lighter skin color, Caucasian facial features, and smoother hair texture.
Like the recurring critiques o f the media, color consciousness is also a common
m otif o f Black wom en’s filmmaking. This chapter examined three distinctly
164
different films, Hair Piece. Lockin’ Up. and A Question o f Color, to deconstruct the
different strategies their respective directors use to reject pigmentocracy and its
representation in film and on television. And finally, chapter five looked at the
continued fight for human and civil rights through the work o f three media
producers who see their artistry as a type o f activism, Madeline Anderson, Portia
Cobb, and Cyrille Phipps.
Black women film and video artists have challenged classical Hollywood
film form and its ideologies by:
- Making their films by using alternative modes o f production. Rather than
using a studio model, or one based on hierarchies, the Black women
filmmakers in this study favor inclusionary rather than exclusionary methods.
They work, as in the example o f Not Channel Zero, in collectives, and also
with each other in mutual support networks (frequently crewing for each
other and working without pay). Many often use their productions as training
ground for new generations o f filmmakers;
- Dictating the terms o f exchange o f their work in the wider culture by either
distributing their own work or choosing non-profit distributors like
Third World Newsreel and Women Make Movies;
- Making Black women the central subjects o f their work, not marginalized as
in commercial mainstream media - evidenced not only in narrative, but also
in shot composition;
165
- Presenting Black women, and wider Black community, as complex, three
dimensional, individuals;
- Celebrating Black culture and imbuing Black American art forms, such as
music, humor, language, and the visual arts with positive connotations
instead o f negative;
- And, as discussed throughout this study, Black women filmmakers
construct their films and videos using structures other than Classical
Hollywood Narrative form.
Areas For Further Study
Though this study contributes to Black progressive film studies, helping to
bring new understanding to the field, it has, like all research endeavors, raised
additional questions and considerations. Perhaps the most compelling is the question
o f efficacy. When examining the use o f cinema as a viable alternative to the racist
and sexist discourse o f Hollywood, one wonders about the effects on spectators. Do
attitudinal shifts occur? Do these films inspire action? How does structure affect the
message received? Do emotional appeals work better than intellectual ones? As I
have shown in this study, Black women media artists use a myriad o f styles -
documentary, experimental, conventional fictional narrative, and satiric comedy. Is
there an approach more effective than others? Audience-centered studies like Bobo’s
(1995) work on Black women’s readings o f Daughters o f the Dust provides a good
example, but more research along these lines are needed.
166
Another question linked to the issue o f empowerment through film is that o f
industry. Though the films discussed are distributed nationally, audiences are
limited because most o f the films do not reach popular audiences through regular
media markets. The majority o f the films are not aired on television, if so only PBS.
They are typically not shown in theaters, and not likely to be found in the local video
store. They m ust be sought out, and audiences must be vigilant, expecting to find
them in art cinemas, museum retrospectives, and on college campuses. But the
clientele o f these spaces tend not to be the audiences these films address. What kind
o f alternative distribution and exhibition methods can be devised so that the films
reach their audiences?
The critical study I have undertaken is only a small addition to the work that
must continue. I do not claim that my readings o f the film are definitive, nor
comprehensive. The enormity o f the gap in the literature relevant to the fields of
American studies, cinema studies, and wom en’s studies is such that one study can
not even begin to fill it. But it helps, continuing the important work begun by an
exiguous number o f scholars. Those with areas o f expertise I do not have might
consider the application o f queer theory to interrogate the construction o f Black
lesbian identity. Researchers knowledgeable o f African history and culture might
interrogate the ways Black women film and video makers image Africa and
incorporate aspects o f African culture into their work. Film scholars interested in the
genre approach may utilize the components o f melodrama to examine constructions
o f romance. As the newly renewed interest in girlhood expands, I hope that
167
researchers will address the construction o f girlhood and coming o f age in films like
Mother o f the River (1995), directed by Zeinabu irene Davis, a film about the
developing friendship between an enslaved girl and a mysterious woman; Ayoka
Chenzira’s Alma’s Rainbow (1993), where a teen struggles to find her identity as her
sexuality blossoms; and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bavou (1997), set in rural Lousiana
in 1962 and focusing on the breakdown o f a family as seen through the eyes o f a
young girl. Other questions to consider ~ How is class conflict among Black
Americans presented? What about the subject o f bi-racial identity? Do Black
women filmmakers address Black relations to other communities o f color? These
questions and more are all viable areas o f research.
168
FILMOGRAPHY
48 Hours. 35mm, color, 97 min. Dir. Walter Hill, 1982.
The Accused. 35mm, color, 110 min. Dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1988.
A.K.A. Don Bonus. 16mm, color, 55 min. Dir. Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny,
1995.
Alice Walker: Visions o f the Spirit. 16mm, color, 58 min. Dir. Elena Featherston,
1989. (WMM)
Alm a’s Rainbow. 35mm, color, 85 min. Dir. Ayoka Chenzira, 1993. (Red
Camelian)
Amistad. 35mm, color, 152 min. Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1997.
Back Inside Herself. 16mm, b/w, 15 min. Dir. Saundra Sharp, 1984. (WMM)
Bad Bovs. 35mm, color, 126 min. Dir. Michael Bay, 1995.
Betrayed. 35mm, color, 127 min. Dir. Costa Gavras,1988.
Beverly Hills Cop. 35mm, color, 105 min. Dir. Martin Brest, 1984.
The Big Hit. 35mm, color, 91 min. Dir. Kirk Wong, 1998.
Birth o f a Nation, b/w, 159 min. Dir. D.W. Griffith, 1915.
The Bodyguard. 35mm, color, 129 min. Dir. Mick Jackson, 1992.
Boomerang. 35mm, color, 118 min. Dir. Reginald Hudlin, 1992.
Bovs on the Side. 35mm, color, 117 min. Dir. Herbert Ross, 1995.
Bovz *n* the Hood. 35mm, color, 107 min. Dir. John Singleton, 1991.
Brick by Brick. 16mm, color, 37 min. Dir. Shirikiana Gerima, 1982. (Myphedu)
Chameleon Street. 35mm, color, 95 min. Dir. Wendell B. Harris, 1991.
The Cinematic Jazz o f Julie Dash. Video, color, 27 min. Dir. Yvonne Welbon,
1992. (WMM)
169
Clara’s Heart. 35mm, color, 108 min. Dir. Robert Mulligan, 1988.
Cool Runnings. 35mm, color, 97 min. Dir. Jon Turtletaub, 1993.
The Cool World. 16mm, b/w, 125 min. Dir. Shirley Clarice, 1963.
Corrina. Corrina. 35mm, color, 114 min. Dir. Jessie Nelson, 1994.
Creating a Different Image. Video, color, 5 min. Dir. O. Funmilayo Makarah, 1989.
Cry Freedom. 35mm, color, 157 min. Dir. Richard Attenborough, 1987.
But Then.. She’s Betty Carter. 16mm, color, 53 min. Dir. Michelle Parkerson, 1980.
(WMM)
Conversations with Rov DeCarava. 16mm, color, 28 min. Dir. Caroll Parrott Blue,
1983. (First Run)
Cycles. 16mm, b/w, 17 min. Dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989. (WMM)
Daughters o f the Dust. 35mm, color, 113 min. Dir. Julie Dash, 1991. (Kino)
Devil in a Blue Dress. 35mm, color, 102 min. Dir. Carl Franklin, 1995.
Die Hard. 35mm, color, 131 min. Dir. John McTieman, 1988.
A Different Image. 16mm, color, 51 min. Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 1982. (WMM)
Doing What it Takes: Black Folks Gettine and Staving Healthy. Video, color,
23 min. Not Channel Zero, 1990. (TWN).
Do the Right Thing. 35mm, color, 120 min. Dir. Spike Lee, 1989.
Eve’s Bavou. 13mm, color, 108 min. Dir. Kasi Lemmons, 1996.
Extra Change. 16mm, color, 28 min. Dir. Carmen Coustaut, 1987. (TWN)
Falling Down. 35mm, color, 115 min. Dir. Joel Schumacher, 1993.
Family Name. 16mm, color, 89 min. Dir. Macky Alston, 1997.
The Fifth Element. 35mm, color, 127 min. Dir. Luc Besson, 1997.
170
Finding Christa. 16mm, color, 60 min. Dir. Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1991.
(TWN)
The Five Heartbeats. 35mm, color, 120 min. Dir. Robert Townsend, 1991.
Flag. Video, color, 26 min. Dir. Linda Gibson, 1989. (WMM)
Four Women. 16mm, b/w 7 min. Dir. Julie Dash, 1975. (TWN)
Fried Green Tomatoes. 35mm, color, 130 min. Dir. John Avnet, 1991.
The Friends. Video, color, 26 min. Dir. Kathe Sandler, 1996. (TWN)
Fundi: The Story o f Ella Baker. 16mm, color, 63 min. Dir. Joanne Grant, 1981.
(New Day)
Ghost. 35mm, color, 122 min. Dir. Jerry Zucker, 1990.
Ghosts o f Mississippi. 35mm, color, 130 min. Dir. Rob Reiner, 1996.
Glorv. 35mm, color, 122 min. Dir. Edward Zwick, 1989.
Gone with the W ind. 35mm, color, 222 min. Dir. Victor Fleming, 1939.
Grand Canvon. 35mm, color, 134 min, Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1991.
Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People. 16mm, color, 10 min.
Dir. Ayoka Chenzira, 1984. (WMM)
Hairsprav. 35mm, color, 96 min. Dir. John Waters, 1988.
Hallelujah! b/w, 106 min. Dir. King Vidor, 1929.
Hanein’ with the Homebovs. 35mm, color, 88 min. Dir. Joseph P. Vasquez, 1991.
Harlem Nights. 35mm, color, 115 min. Dir. Eddie Murphy, 1989.
Hollywood Shuffle. 35mm, color, 82 min. Dir. Robert Townsend, 1987.
House Party. 35mm, color, 100 min. Dir. Reginald Hudlin, 1990.
House Party II. 35mm, color, 94 min. Dir. Doug McHenry, 1991.
171
I Am Somebody. 16mm, color, 28 min. Dir. Madeline Anderson, 1969.
(First Run/Icarus).
I Be Done Was Is. 16mm, color, 58 min. Dir. Debra Robinson, 1984. (WMM)
I Like It Like That. 35mm, color, 105 min. Dir. Darnell Martin, 1994.
Illusions. 16mm, b/w, 34 min. Dir. Julie Dash, 1983. (WMM and TWN).
Independence D ay. 35mm, color, 145 min. Dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996.
Imitation o f Life. 35mm, b/w, 109 min. Dir. John M. Stahl, 1934.
Imitation o f Life. 35mm, color, 124 min. Dir. Douglas Sirk, 1959.
In This Our Life. 35mm, b/w, 97 min. Dir. John Huston, 1942.
I Remain. 16mm, b/w, 15 min. Dir. Tricia Hilliard, 1989.
Jaws. 35mm, color, 124 min. Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975.
The Jazz Singer, b/w, 89 min. Dir. Alan Crosland, 1927.
Jerry Maguire. 35mm, color, 138 min. Dir. Cameron Crowe, 1996.
Juice. 35mm, color, 92 min. Dir. Ernest Dickerson, 1992.
Jungle Fever. 35mm, color, 132 min. Dir. Spike Lee, 1991.
Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. 35mm, color, 92 min. Dir. Leslie Harris, 1991.
The KKK Boutique A in’t Just Rednecks. 16mm, color, 77 min.

Dir. Camille Billops, 1994 (TWN)
Land Where Mv Fathers Died. 16mm, color, 23 min. Dir. Daresha Kyi, 1991.
(WMM)
Lethal Weapon. 35mm, color, 110 min. Dir. Richard Donner, 1987.
The Life and Times o f Rosie the Riveter. 16mm, color and b/w, 58 min.
Dir. Connie Field, 1980.
Lilies o f the Field. 35mm,b/w, 93 min. Dir. Ralph Nelson, 1963.
172
The Lion King. 35mm, color, 88mm. Dir. Roger Allers, 1994.
A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work o f Audre Lorde. 16mm, color, 88 min.
Dir. Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin, 1995. (TWN)
Livin’ Large. 35mm, color, 96 min. Dir. Michael Schultz, 1991.
Living Out Loud. 35mm, color, 99 min. Dir. Richard La Gravenese, 1998.
Lockin’ Up. Video, color, 29 min. Dir. T. Nicole Atkinson, 1997. (WMM)
The Long Walk Home. 16mm, color, 28 min. Dir. Beverlyn Fray, 1987. (USC)
The Long W alk Home. 35mm, color, 97 min. Dir. Richard Pearce, 1990.
Losing Ground. 16mm, color, 86 min. Dir. Kathleen Collins, 1982. (Myphedu)
Mama’s Pushcart. Video, color, 54 min. Dir. Demetria Royals and Louise Diamond,
1988. (WMM)
Man with a Movie Camera. 35mm, b/w, 80 min. Dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929.
Marked for Death. 35mm, color, 94 min. Dir. Dwight H. Little, 1990.
The Matrix. 35mm, color, 136 min. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachouwski, 1999.
A Minor Altercation. 16mm, color, 30 min. Dir. Jackie Shearer, 1997. (WMM)
Miss Fluci Moses. Video, color, 22 min. Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 1987. (WMM)
Mississippi Burning. 35mm, color, 125 min. Dir.Alan Parker, 1988.
Monique. 16mm, b/w, 3 min. Dir. Yvonne Welbon, 1990. (TWN)
Mother o f the River 16mm, b/w 30 min. Dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1995.
(Wimmin with a Mission)
New Jack Citv. 35mm, color, 97 min. Dir. Mario Van Peebles, 1991.
Nightmare Before Christmas. 35mm, color, 75 min. Dir. Tim Burton, 1993.
No Justice No Peace. Video, color, 15 min. Dir. Portia Cobb, 1991. (TWN)
October. 35mm, b/w, 104 min. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1927.
173
Older Women and Love. 16mm, color, 26 min. Dir. Camille Billops, 1987. (TWN)
A Period Piece. Video, color, 4 min. Dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1991 (WMM)
Picking Tribes. 16mm, color, 7 min. Dir. Saundra Sharp, 1988. (WMM)
Pinky. 35mm, color, 102 min. Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949.
Places in the Heart. 35mm, color, 102 min. Dir. Robert Benton, 1982.
Playtime. 70mm, color, 108 min. Dir. Jaques Tati, 1967.
The Plow That Broke the Plains. 16mm, b/w, 25 min. Dir. Pare Lorentz, 1936.
Potempkin. 35mm, b/w, 75 min. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925.
A Powerful Thang. 16mm, color, 51 min. Dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1991 (WMM)
Praise House. Video, color, 27 min. Dir. Julie Dash, 1991 (TWN)
A Question o f Color. 16mm, color, 58 min. Dir. Kathe Sandler, 1992. (CN)
A Rage in Harlem. 35mm, color, 115 min. Dir. Bill Duke, 1991.
Rags and Old Love. 16mm, b/w, 55 min. Ellen Sumter,1986.
Remembering Thelma. 16mm, b/w, 15 min. Dir. Kathe Sandler, 1981. (WMM)
Remembering Wei Yi-Fang. Remembering Mvself. Video, color and b/w, 30 min.
Dir. Yvonne Welbon, 1995. (TWN)
The River. 16mm, b/w, 29 min. Dir. Pare Lorentz, 1937.
Sahara. 35mm, b/w, 97 min. Dir. Zoltan Korda, 1943.
Schindler’s List. 35mm, b/w, 195 min. Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993.
Secret Sounds Screaming. Video, color, 30 min. Dir. Ayoka Chenzira, 1986.
(WMM)
Shane. 35mm, color, 118 min. Dir. George Stevens, 1953.
She’s Gotta Have It. 35mm, b/w, 84 min. Dir. Spike Lee, 1986.
174
Sisters in the Life. Video, color, 30 min. Dir. Yvonne Welbon, 1993. (TWN)
Star W ars. 35mm, color, 121 min. Dir. George Lucas, 1977.
Storme: The Lady o f the Jewelbox. 16mm, color, 21 min. Dir. Michelle Parkerson,
1987. (WMM)
Straight Out o f Brooklyn. 35mm, color, 91 min. Dir. Matty Rich, 1991.
Strictly Business. 35mm, color, 83 min. Dir. Kevin Hooks, 1991.
Sudden Impact. 35mm, color, 117 min. Dir. Clint Eastwood, 1983.
Surf N azi’s Must Die. 35mm, color, 83 min. Dir. Peter George, 1987.
Suzanne. Suzanne. 16mm, b/w 26 min. Dir. Camille Billops and James Hatch, 1982.
(TWN)
Sylvilla: They Dance to Her Drum . 16mm, color, 25 min. Dir. Ayoka Chenzira,
1979. (Red Camelian).
Talkin’ Dirty After Dark. 35mm, color, 86 min. Dir. Topper Carew, 1991.
Taxi Driver. 35mm, color, 113 min. Dir. Martin Scorcese, 1976.
The Thm Blue Line. 35min, color and b/w, 96 min. Dir. Errol Morris, 1988.
A Time to Kill. 35mm, color, 149 min. Dir. Joel Schumacher, 1996.
Tongues Untied. Video, color, 55 min. Dir. Marlon Riggs, 1989.
To Sleep with Anger. 35mm, color, 102 min. Dir. Charles Burnett, 1991.
The Trigger Effect. 35mm, color, 98 min. Dir. David Koepp, 1998.
True Identity. 35mm, color, 93 min. Dir. Charles Lane, 1991.
Unfinished Diarv. 16mm, color, 55 min. Dir. Marilu Mallet, 1986.
Waiting to Exhale. 35mm, color, 121 min. Dir. Forest Whitaker, 1995.
The Watermelon Woman. 16mm, color and b/w, Dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996.
(First Run/Icarus)
175
Vamette’s World: A Study o f a Young Artist. 16mm, color, 26 min. Dir. Carroll
Parrott Blue, 1979.
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite o f Purification. 16mm, color, 4 min. Dir. Barbara
McCullough, 1979. (TWN)
Zaiota and the Boogie Spirit. 16mm, color 20 min. Dir. Ayoka Chenzira, 1989.
(Red Camelian)
DISTRIBUTORS
California Newsreel (CN) Kino International

149 Ninth Street 333 West 39th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103 New York, NY 10018
Tel: 415 621 6196 Tel: 212 629 6880
Fax: 415 621 6522 Fax: 212 714 0871
First Run/Icarus Moving Image Archive (USC)

153 Waverly Place, 6th FI. School o f Cinema and Television
New York, NY 10014 University o f Southern California
Tel: 212 727 1711 Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211
New Day Films Myphedu Films

121 W. 27th Street P.O. Box 10035
Room 902 Washington DC 20018
New York, NY 10011 Tel: 202 234 4765
Tel: 212 645 8210
Third World Newsreel (TWN) Red Camelian

335 W. 38* Street, 5th Floor 107 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10018 Brooklyn, NY 11238-1401
Tel: 212-947-9277 Tel: 718 622 5092
Women Make Movies (WMM) Wimmin with a Mission

262 Broadway, Suite 500k 7727 N. Marshfield Ave #7
New York, NY 10013 Chicago, IL 60626-1107
Tel: 212 925-0606 Tel: 708 467 1164
Most o f the films can also be found at The Black Film/Center Archive, Smith
Research Center 180-181, 2805 E. 10* Street Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
47408 Tel: 812 855 6041 www.indiana.edu/~bfca/index.html
176
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Bell & Howell Information and Learning

Title o f Dissertation: CHALLENGING RACISM AND SEXISM

THROUGH CINEMATIC DISCOURSE:

BLACK WOMEN FILM AND VIDEO MAKERS

Frances K. Gateward, Doctor o f Philosophy, 2000

Dissertation directed by: Professor A. Lynn Bolles

This dissertation examines the work o f contemporary Black American

concentrate on five core themes identified in their work: criticism o f Hollywood’s

exclusionary practices; the relations between American history, popular memory,

media production as a form o f social activism.

BLACK WOMEN FILM AND VIDEO MAKERS

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty o f the Graduate School o f the

Professor A. Lynn Bolles, Chair

All rights reserved.

Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company

I would like to thank m y family, especially my mother, for their continuing

encouragement and support.

Chapter One: The Problem is not how to Make a Political Film

Chapter Two: Documenting the Struggle........................................ 72

Chapter Three: Exploding Myths, Expanding Boundaries............. 101

Chapter Four: The Color Com plex................................................ 123

Chapter Five: Imagery for Action................................................... 138

Bibliography o f Cited Works...............................................................177

$175,000 that made over $8 million at the box-office, Robert Townsend’s

Tapes o f Dexter Jackson. Chameleon Street. Straight Out of Brooklyn. Strictly

o f Black-themed films played in commercial theaters since the Blaxploitation

generated a profit -- Julie Dash’s Daughters o f the Dust. Recognized internationally

first feature film directed by a Black American woman to be nationally distributed,

enslaved Africans to be smuggled in illegally as late as 1858, and coupled with

problems with financing. As she explains, “Originally, when I finished the

the Georgia Council on the Humanities, the National Black Programming

Association, and American Playhouse, Dash sought Hollywood distributors after

a seventeen-year-old college bound high school girl whose life is complicated by an

woman to have a film released by a major Hollywood distributor (Miramax). _I Like

direct a movie produced by a Hollywood studio (Columbia Pictures), about a woman

world like the Emmy-Award-winning Marlon Riggs, director o f the documentaries

Black prejudice, and Tongues Untied (1990), an experimental work on the

on the consciousness-raising o f a woman on public assistance, Ashes and Embers

Jamaica. And o f course, there was no acknowledgment o f Black Women filmmakers.

their work serves as critical examples o f radical cinema, in opposition to classical

narrative unity, establishing a more politically progressive and less manipulative

construct a discourse that opposes racism and sexism.

distortion” (1987, 12).

tribute to Ellen Stewart, founder o f New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre

Company: community issues, such as housing discrimination in Brick Bv Brick

Fang. Remembering Mvself (1992), an autobiographical documentary by Yvonne

Lorde (1994), a portrait o f the award winning poet/essayist/activist who dedicated

filmmakers offer resistance to the mainstream media industries’ reinforcement of

sexist and racist hegemonies.

Review o f the Literature

Film, like the other forms o f mass communication, is a complex and

multifaceted entity, existing simultaneously within the realms of art, technology,

province o f scholars located in marginalized communities. Film scholars such as

discriminatory operations are manifested in a variety o f forms. They include the

practice o f rendering entire groups invisible, stereotyping, constructing diverse

heterogeneous cultures as monolithic, infandlization, and covert racial codings.

exclusionary practices o f mainstream media. Despite a pact made between the

on Civil Rights in 1997, a boycott o f television in 1999 by Latino/a Americans and a

On those occasions when the Other is depicted, it is often in the form o f

stereotypes, one-dimensional characterizations that represent oversimplified and