Screening

1
Screening The OtherThe Movies, Race and
Ethnicity
Gary Handman Director Media Resources
Center Moffitt Library ghandman_at_library.berkeley.e
du
2
(No Transcript)
3
Screening The OtherThe Movies, Race and
Ethnicity
Gary Handman Director Media Resources
Center Moffitt Library ghandman_at_library.berkeley.e
du
4

What Is Cinema? --Jacques Bazin
5
What Is Cinema?

• A wildly popular, 120-year old diversion and
  entertainment.
• An increasingly complex artistic endeavor
  involving various authors and actualizers
  (screenwriters, directors, actors, technicians)
• A highly exportable commodity a global good with
  impact on global culture.
• A unique form of grammar (a new way of
  describing/viewing/representing the world and/or
  of telling stories)
• A cultural product that comprises various genres
  and styles fiction to non-fiction and forms
  in-between

6
What Is Cinema?
Its ONLY A Movie!
A. Hitchcock
7
What Is Cinema?
but a movie is NEVER only a movie!
Movies are a cultural construct
8
"Film is more than the twentieth-century art.
It's another part of the Twentieth-Century mind.
It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a
certain point in the history of film. If a thing
can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing
itself. This is where we are. The Twentieth
century is on film....You have to ask yourself if
there's anything about us more important than the
fact that we're constantly on film constantly
watching ourselves."
--Don Delillo (The Names)
9

Every Film Is a Documentary --Bill Nichols
?
10
Documentaries of Wish Fulfillment
Documentaries of Social Representation
11
Documentaries of Wish Fulfillment

• Deal with imagined realities
• Requires that the viewer suspend disbelief that
  we engage with imagined worlds.
• Ultimate Goal to entertain
• Document the image in front of the camera
• Document the cultural beliefs and assumptions,
  fantasies, fetishes of the times serve as a kind
  or cultural text (rather than a straight
  historical record)

12
Documentaries of Social Representation

• Imaginative representation of historical or
  personal reality
• Lay claims to representing the Truth (unlike
  films of wish fulfillment)
• A Discourse of Sobriety (along with politics,
  history, economics)
• Use of evidence drawn from the real world
• Make arguments and claims about the world outside
  of the theater
• Goal to have the viewer believe in what is being
  represented to act on those beliefs in concrete
  ways

13
But the Earliest Motion Pictures were neither

• Actualities movies of the real world
• (La Vie sur la Vif Life being Lived)
• Short sketches and routines (often replicating
  earlier theatrical forms.
• Trick films (the earliest special effects)
• Newsreels and Travel Films (increasingly
  pitched to audience taste for the sensational,
  exotic culturally alien)
• The Cinema of Attractions focus on spectacle
  rather than story popular for the same reason
  worlds fairs and other exhibitions were popular.

14
Birth of the Movies 1880s early 1900s
Correspond with Enormous Societal Changes

• Political expansionism and colonialism
• Industrial and technological revolutions
• Demographic shifts movement from rural to urban
• Enormous increase in immigration
• 1870-1900 12 million immigrants
• Growth of urban Middle Class
• Increase in leisure time

The movies reflect these cultural and societal
changes
15
Birth of the Movies 1880s early 1900s
Correspond with Enormous Societal Changes

Immigrants as audiences The movies as a
cultural port of entry
New immigrants as movie subjects characters
16
And targets

Cohens Advertising Scheme Edwin S. Porter (1904)
One of earliest filmic examples of anti-semitic
stereotyping. Porter spools off a whole series
of Cohen films between 1904 and 1905
17
the other Others

• The movies adopt and intensify ongoing fantasies,
  fears, stereotypes, and cultural metaphors re
  race ethnicity.
• The movies make these fantasies a part of the
  mass culture/cultural consciousness in
  unprecedented ways.
• Studios are the in business of making profitable
  films, not questioning prevailing mainstream
  social and political views and assumptions.

18
Uncle Toms Cabin Edwin S. Porter (1903)

• Based on Harriett Beacher Stowes wildly popular
  serialized novel (1852) written in response to
  1850 Fugitive Slave Act (300K copies sold in
  first year)
• Porters 1903 version One of earliest
  full-length films
• Tom American films first named black character
• Filmed only 38 years after the signing of the
  Emancipation Proclamation
• Borrows many of its cinematic conventions from
  earlier theatrical productions (Tom Shows and
  Vaudeville)

19
Uncle Toms Cabin Edwin S. Porter (1903)

• Dozens of subsequent film versions
• Establishes many of stereotypes of African
  Americans that would persist over the next
  century
• The happy darky (what Donald Bogle calls The
  Coon)
• The tragic mulatto as sex object
• The Mammy
• The pickanniny
• The Tom
• See also Donald Bogles Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
  Mammies Bucks
• (Moffitt Main Libraries PN 1995.9 N4 B6 2001)

Edwin S. Porter
20
Uncle Toms Cabin Edwin S. Porter (1903)
21
Birth of a Nation D.W. Griffith (1915)

• Based on a play by the Rev. Thomas Wheeler Dixon,
  Jr.
• The most popular and profitable early film
  First boxoffice blockbuster
• Protested vigorously by the NAACP
• Censored in some states (notably Ohio) leads to
  Supreme Court ruling in 1916 holding that films
  can be legally censored (because of their vivid
  psychological effect on women, children and
  lower classes)
• Coincides with the revitalization of the KKK

22
Birth of a Nation D.W. Griffith (1915)
23
(Biograph, 1905)
24
Broken Blossoms (or, The Yellow Man and the
Girl)D.W. Griffith (1915)
25
The CheatCecil B. DeMille (1915)
Sessue Hayakawa
26
The Jazz Singer (1927)
Or Whats a Nice Jewish Boy Like You Doing in
a Face Like That!

27

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
28


Gone with the Wind (1939)
29

Stepin Fetchit Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew
Perry(1902 - 1985)
30
Animated Shorts 1919-1940 Are We Amused Yet?
Chinese Laundry Blues (1930?) Scrub Me Mama
(1943)
31
Separate Cinemas Movies Beyond the Cultural
Mainstream
Yiddish Films (1930s-40s)
Oscar Micheaux Independent Black Cinema (Race
Movies) (1920s-50s)
Edgar G. Ulmer
32
World War II The Expedients of Democrary Or
Redefining Refiguring The Other
Know Your Enemy Japan Frank Capra for the US
Army) (1945)
The Negro Soldier Frank Capra for the US
Army) (1944)
33
Post-War America The Image Begins to
ShiftSocial Problem Films
Dir. Stanley Kramer, 1958
Pinky Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949
Dir. Elia Kazan, 1949
34
Hes a Mean Mutha 1970s Blaxploitation
35

The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teacher
(Biograph, 1904)