One
All too often we as African-Americans use the art form of cinema as a signifying practice; that is to say we are caught in the attempt to try to replicate certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with and therefore signify as true. These certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with in our filmic representation of ourselves can be described as a realist tendency, not so much politically proscribed as Soviet Realism during the Communist era, but instead determined and maintained by strongly held belief systems within and outside of our race.(1) If there is a realist tendency in African-American film, it manifests itself as an artistically limited need to show how African-American life really is (in the Ghetto, on the dense urban streets, la vie qoutidienne) and let the audience signify the validity or ‘truthfulness’ of a particular film via the box office gross and DVD sales.
The problem with this realist tendency in African-American film is that it secures and legitimates a belief system which is then tied to our racial identity and poisons our perception of our social realities. No matter how much evidence there is to contradict what we believe to be true about ourselves, we always find aspects of our lives that fit our preconceived beliefs and signify it to be true. For example, if it is generally believed that a majority of Black men don't take care of their children, then any evidence to the contrary is usually discredited, dismissed, or simply ignored. This goes a long way in explaining why the box-office gross of Tyler Perry's film, DADDY'S LITTLE GIRLS (2007), was his lowest grossing film to date. It also explains the release of films like, JUMPING THE BROOM (2011), LOTTERY TICKET(2010), WHO’S YOUR CADDY?(2007), ATL (2006), ROLL BOUNCE (2005), SOUL PLANE (2004) etc, because these films don't challenge what we believe we know about ourselves but instead these films and others like them reiterate this signifying practice of the realist tendency in African-American film. We are limited by our own limited perspective of ourselves; we are bound by the chains that we have ourselves fashioned.
In an appendix in my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Edition (2011), I commented on this realist tendency in my critical analysis of the fourth season of the HBO cable network show THE WIRE.
“THE WIRE is successful only in that it recapitulates a pessimistic and grim perspective of urban ghetto life that most of its viewers need to believe in as a way of measuring the advantages or disadvantages of their own real life circumstances. Those who don’t live in such a ghetto can say to themselves,” Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those problems,” and those that do can say to themselves,” This is the way it really is here in the ghetto.” But it is really a matter of perception exemplified by sociologist Elijah Anderson’s dichotomy of decent and street in his book, CODE OF THE STREET. Those who are glad they don’t have to deal with those problems as dramatized in the show are holding on to decent middle class values in their real lives and those that see those problems as a realistic portrayal of their day to day experiences are adhering to a street orientation which is opposed to those middle class values. These beliefs can be maintained by either kind of viewer even if such a view of urban ghetto life as presented in THE WIRE is not entirely true or realistic.” (pg. 260)
In short, what we signify as ‘black’ is really a matter of perspective and perception that when it is transposed into the medium of film, many black and white filmmakers adhere to these perceptions for the sake of making the material appear ‘realistic’ or authentic, when in actuality this perception is a simplification of the most complex aspects of our racial identity. To give a more explicit rendering of my point it has been reported that during in a 24 hour period on a weekend in August of 2011, 17 people were shot and 6 people were killed in my city of Detroit.(2) This news sent shockwaves throughout the city and around the country. These news reports give the impression of lawlessness and a grim day-to-day reality in the urban ghetto. But during this same 24 hour period the majority of the citizens in Detroit lived their lives within the boundaries of the law and without incident. That is to say, that the violent impression of the urban ghetto is constructed and maintained both by how the media sensationalizes and concentrates its crime reporting and how these news reports feed into a preconceived pessimistic and grim perspective of the urban ghetto held by whites and blacks alike. Thus, the actuality of urban ghetto life that can be perceived through the day-to-day interactions of people who do not commit violent crimes is swept away by the need to believe in a lawless and grim day-to-day perspective of the urban ghetto that is fed by media reports and preconceived ideas.
It is this need to believe in a lawless and grim urban ghetto that so many black filmmakers refuse to challenge because they only consider the content of their films (positive images/negative images) and not the formal organization of their films (editing, mise-en-scene, acting styles, music, shot selection and narrative organization) as a means to challenge the perspective that so many of us need to believe is true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Therefore, many black filmmakers don’t realize that it is the conventional formal organization of their films that supports the realist tendency in African-American cinema and not solely the content. Simply making sure that all the black characters have jobs and adhere to “decent” middle class values does not capture the complexity of our racial identity nor our social realities. There are several questions begged here in my description: Whether or not just because we as blacks identify with a certain aspect of African-American life represented on screen can the formal organization of the film allow us to question that representation? Does an alternative formal organization of the film expose certain social processes and ideological mechanisms that are hidden from us by a conventional representation of the same events or circumstances? Can a film actually challenge what we need to believe is real with an approach to the complexity of how things actually are? Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race?
This last question is actually the most important: Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race? Can the black scholar carry a gun? Can the black gang banger comprehend Charles W. Mill’s The Racial Contract? What we also learn from Elijah Anderson’s CODE OF THE STREET is that most African-Americans engage in a form of,” Code switching,” where individuals switch to the codes and informal rules of the street in social settings that require a readiness for violence and a jockeying for status and respect and then switching back to the codes and rules of decent “bourgeois” mentality when in those social settings that require adherence to middle-class moral values and a display of intelligence and cultural wit. (98-106, Anderson) Therefore, an African-American realist tendency in film has filmmakers representing only one aspect of our dual nature (or code) so that an audience can readily identify these selected aspects and signify what they see as true. This exploitation/representation of one selected aspect over another suppressed aspect is what generated the “In the ‘Hood,” genre of films versus the “Family/Love” genre of African-American films in the Nineties. Today, in a film like,” JUMPING THE BROOM,” we see the two aspects combined as a comical conflict of class expectations between an upper middle class family and an urban working class family. The individuality of a character is suppressed to represent a certain type or class of individuals who adhere to decent or street codes of behaviors and expectations.
Some of the aspects of what I call a realist tendency in African-American film can be described as dramatic and performance paradigms that are repeated in films that feature a majority African-American cast and/or themes and circumstances that are used to represent the urban ghetto:
1) Dialogue that uses curse words spoken in an urban (read: black) dialect. For example the word “motherfucker” is pronounced,” mutherfucka,” to signify urban authenticity or African-American realism. Often when a black actor is cast in a film, lines of dialogue are either changed or improvised by the actor to adhere to this African-American realist tendency. For example, singer/actress Kelly Rowland’s angry cursing in 2003’s FREDDY v. JASON and of course the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).
2) A male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence that follows a theme of revenge (for perceived insults, slights and dishonor) and retaliation (against the members of an opposing gang, or persons perceived to have ordered violence). The ‘In the ‘hood,’ films of the nineties and beyond exemplify this aspect. Most importantly street level drug dealing is almost always associated with Black males as can be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s film, TRAFFIC (2000) where a black male drug dealer sexually exploits a white Ohio Judge’s drug addicted daughter.
3) The mistreatment, torture or death of an innocent character as an ironic counterpoint to those guilty individuals engaging in street violence, drug dealing or other lawless behavior. Perhaps starting with the death of Ricky (Morris Chestnut) in Singleton’s ,” BOYZ IN THE HOOD (1991) and continuing well through such films as JASON’S LYRIC and FRESH, the killing of an innocent is an aspect of African-American social reality that is often used to support a realist tendency in films that represent African-Americans. (3)
4) The use of Rap/R&B music as a soundtrack throughout scenes to reinforce the urban dialect of the dialogue, the male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence, and the threat of violence within the content of the story; in short to reinforce the ‘blackness’ of the story or character who is black within the story. An interesting representation of this paradigm can be seen in John Carpenter’s masterpiece remake of Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film THE THING (1982) where Stevie Wonder’s song, “Superstition” is associated with the black character, Nauls (T.C. Carter).
5) The dramatic creation of black characters limited by the dual nature of African-American realist tendencies which can be categorized by the antinomies listed: street/decent, ghetto/bourgeois, lower class/middle class, urban/rural, northern/southern, west coast/east coast, dark skinned/light skinned, house nigger/field nigger… In effect, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to write of black characters as: scientists (although there are many), world explorers, fantasy heroes (African folklore), astronauts, spies, revolutionaries, Presidents, kings, queens, mythological heroes, gods, conquerors, oracles, geniuses, madmen, composers and virtuosos. We are chained to a limited perception of whether the black character is from the ‘hood or from the affluent suburbs and this leads to a singular dramatic conflict between the ‘hood character and the bourgeois character.
These aspects, taken together, constrict the variation in narrative style and severely limit the content of many African-American filmmaker’s works by coercing African-American audiences to expect these particular aspects in films so that they might identify with the characters and the circumstances and thus signify the film as a true representation. Moreover, African-American filmmakers, either out of fear of not attaining financing for their work or being simply oblivious to these restrictions because they themselves see the limitations as true, don’t utilize alternative formal strategies to challenge these representations. Among the ways in which we know that this realist tendency constricts African-American filmmakers in both the form and content of their work is the fact that we have yet to successfully produce a feature length African-American science fiction or fantasy film. These genres are in themselves antithetical to the various aspects of the realist tendency that I have just described. How can we ever know what freedom is if we don’t believe it to be true or an actual aspect of our racial identity and social realities?
Having described what I assert are some of the major aspects of a realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics, the second part of this essay will endeavor to suggest various formal strategies African-American filmmakers who want make challenging films with unique and distinctive narrative and cinematic styles might utilize to go beyond these restrictions in the representation of race in the cinema. Yet, to make these suggestions I will have to do what is thought of as untenable in most discussions of African-American film aesthetics. I will have to draw on the work of white American, European and foreign filmmakers and/or theorists. Such suggestions that draw on the work of whites are often perceived by many black film scholars, critics and theorists as an attempt to,” use the Hollywood tradition and its system of ideological supports as the basis for evaluating black filmmaking.” (4) That is to say, that previous black scholarship and criticism’s conceptualization of what constitutes ‘white cinema’ does not distinctly differentiate among Hollywood, European, and foreign filmmakers, but instead groups all non-black filmmakers as part of the conspiracy of global white supremacy in the cinema. But as I attempted to reveal in a new chapter called,” Race Traitors: White Filmmakers Who Make Black Films,” in the second edition of my book, SLAVE CINEMA, there were and still are many white American and European filmmakers who challenge conventional racial representations via the formal organization of their films which include African-American actors and/or themes.
A major mistake in my opinion in African-American film criticism and scholarship is the presumption that film form is as racially coded as film content. That, for example, the incendiary racism that constitutes D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) extends beyond the racist content and taints the formal cinematic language and editorial structure of the film. Yet, the fact that Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the form and structure of BIRTH OF A NATION and other white capitalist American filmmaker’s work in their apprehension of film form provides some evidence to disprove that the cinema’s formal language is inherently racist. In short, the point-of-view shot sequence is not racist and is an integral aspect of filmic narration, but rather the point of view of the filmmaker and the content he creates can be explicitly racist. This is why the second part of this essay will concentrate on what I believe to be the originating sources of African-American critical analysis of racial representation (or content) and the conflation of film form and racist film content and this error has contributed to the realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics. As we shall see, it is not just content that African-American filmmakers must manipulate to challenge racial, ideological and political regimes, but also the formal organization of their films must be aggressively manipulated to challenge their audiences.
All too often we as African-Americans use the art form of cinema as a signifying practice; that is to say we are caught in the attempt to try to replicate certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with and therefore signify as true. These certain aspects of African-American life that we all can identify with in our filmic representation of ourselves can be described as a realist tendency, not so much politically proscribed as Soviet Realism during the Communist era, but instead determined and maintained by strongly held belief systems within and outside of our race.(1) If there is a realist tendency in African-American film, it manifests itself as an artistically limited need to show how African-American life really is (in the Ghetto, on the dense urban streets, la vie qoutidienne) and let the audience signify the validity or ‘truthfulness’ of a particular film via the box office gross and DVD sales.
The problem with this realist tendency in African-American film is that it secures and legitimates a belief system which is then tied to our racial identity and poisons our perception of our social realities. No matter how much evidence there is to contradict what we believe to be true about ourselves, we always find aspects of our lives that fit our preconceived beliefs and signify it to be true. For example, if it is generally believed that a majority of Black men don't take care of their children, then any evidence to the contrary is usually discredited, dismissed, or simply ignored. This goes a long way in explaining why the box-office gross of Tyler Perry's film, DADDY'S LITTLE GIRLS (2007), was his lowest grossing film to date. It also explains the release of films like, JUMPING THE BROOM (2011), LOTTERY TICKET(2010), WHO’S YOUR CADDY?(2007), ATL (2006), ROLL BOUNCE (2005), SOUL PLANE (2004) etc, because these films don't challenge what we believe we know about ourselves but instead these films and others like them reiterate this signifying practice of the realist tendency in African-American film. We are limited by our own limited perspective of ourselves; we are bound by the chains that we have ourselves fashioned.
In an appendix in my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film 2nd Edition (2011), I commented on this realist tendency in my critical analysis of the fourth season of the HBO cable network show THE WIRE.
“THE WIRE is successful only in that it recapitulates a pessimistic and grim perspective of urban ghetto life that most of its viewers need to believe in as a way of measuring the advantages or disadvantages of their own real life circumstances. Those who don’t live in such a ghetto can say to themselves,” Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those problems,” and those that do can say to themselves,” This is the way it really is here in the ghetto.” But it is really a matter of perception exemplified by sociologist Elijah Anderson’s dichotomy of decent and street in his book, CODE OF THE STREET. Those who are glad they don’t have to deal with those problems as dramatized in the show are holding on to decent middle class values in their real lives and those that see those problems as a realistic portrayal of their day to day experiences are adhering to a street orientation which is opposed to those middle class values. These beliefs can be maintained by either kind of viewer even if such a view of urban ghetto life as presented in THE WIRE is not entirely true or realistic.” (pg. 260)
In short, what we signify as ‘black’ is really a matter of perspective and perception that when it is transposed into the medium of film, many black and white filmmakers adhere to these perceptions for the sake of making the material appear ‘realistic’ or authentic, when in actuality this perception is a simplification of the most complex aspects of our racial identity. To give a more explicit rendering of my point it has been reported that during in a 24 hour period on a weekend in August of 2011, 17 people were shot and 6 people were killed in my city of Detroit.(2) This news sent shockwaves throughout the city and around the country. These news reports give the impression of lawlessness and a grim day-to-day reality in the urban ghetto. But during this same 24 hour period the majority of the citizens in Detroit lived their lives within the boundaries of the law and without incident. That is to say, that the violent impression of the urban ghetto is constructed and maintained both by how the media sensationalizes and concentrates its crime reporting and how these news reports feed into a preconceived pessimistic and grim perspective of the urban ghetto held by whites and blacks alike. Thus, the actuality of urban ghetto life that can be perceived through the day-to-day interactions of people who do not commit violent crimes is swept away by the need to believe in a lawless and grim day-to-day perspective of the urban ghetto that is fed by media reports and preconceived ideas.
It is this need to believe in a lawless and grim urban ghetto that so many black filmmakers refuse to challenge because they only consider the content of their films (positive images/negative images) and not the formal organization of their films (editing, mise-en-scene, acting styles, music, shot selection and narrative organization) as a means to challenge the perspective that so many of us need to believe is true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Therefore, many black filmmakers don’t realize that it is the conventional formal organization of their films that supports the realist tendency in African-American cinema and not solely the content. Simply making sure that all the black characters have jobs and adhere to “decent” middle class values does not capture the complexity of our racial identity nor our social realities. There are several questions begged here in my description: Whether or not just because we as blacks identify with a certain aspect of African-American life represented on screen can the formal organization of the film allow us to question that representation? Does an alternative formal organization of the film expose certain social processes and ideological mechanisms that are hidden from us by a conventional representation of the same events or circumstances? Can a film actually challenge what we need to believe is real with an approach to the complexity of how things actually are? Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race?
This last question is actually the most important: Are we African-Americans capable of tolerating a film that questions our often limited perspectives on ourselves as a race? Can the black scholar carry a gun? Can the black gang banger comprehend Charles W. Mill’s The Racial Contract? What we also learn from Elijah Anderson’s CODE OF THE STREET is that most African-Americans engage in a form of,” Code switching,” where individuals switch to the codes and informal rules of the street in social settings that require a readiness for violence and a jockeying for status and respect and then switching back to the codes and rules of decent “bourgeois” mentality when in those social settings that require adherence to middle-class moral values and a display of intelligence and cultural wit. (98-106, Anderson) Therefore, an African-American realist tendency in film has filmmakers representing only one aspect of our dual nature (or code) so that an audience can readily identify these selected aspects and signify what they see as true. This exploitation/representation of one selected aspect over another suppressed aspect is what generated the “In the ‘Hood,” genre of films versus the “Family/Love” genre of African-American films in the Nineties. Today, in a film like,” JUMPING THE BROOM,” we see the two aspects combined as a comical conflict of class expectations between an upper middle class family and an urban working class family. The individuality of a character is suppressed to represent a certain type or class of individuals who adhere to decent or street codes of behaviors and expectations.
Some of the aspects of what I call a realist tendency in African-American film can be described as dramatic and performance paradigms that are repeated in films that feature a majority African-American cast and/or themes and circumstances that are used to represent the urban ghetto:
1) Dialogue that uses curse words spoken in an urban (read: black) dialect. For example the word “motherfucker” is pronounced,” mutherfucka,” to signify urban authenticity or African-American realism. Often when a black actor is cast in a film, lines of dialogue are either changed or improvised by the actor to adhere to this African-American realist tendency. For example, singer/actress Kelly Rowland’s angry cursing in 2003’s FREDDY v. JASON and of course the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994).
2) A male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence that follows a theme of revenge (for perceived insults, slights and dishonor) and retaliation (against the members of an opposing gang, or persons perceived to have ordered violence). The ‘In the ‘hood,’ films of the nineties and beyond exemplify this aspect. Most importantly street level drug dealing is almost always associated with Black males as can be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s film, TRAFFIC (2000) where a black male drug dealer sexually exploits a white Ohio Judge’s drug addicted daughter.
3) The mistreatment, torture or death of an innocent character as an ironic counterpoint to those guilty individuals engaging in street violence, drug dealing or other lawless behavior. Perhaps starting with the death of Ricky (Morris Chestnut) in Singleton’s ,” BOYZ IN THE HOOD (1991) and continuing well through such films as JASON’S LYRIC and FRESH, the killing of an innocent is an aspect of African-American social reality that is often used to support a realist tendency in films that represent African-Americans. (3)
4) The use of Rap/R&B music as a soundtrack throughout scenes to reinforce the urban dialect of the dialogue, the male dominated world of drug dealing and gun violence, and the threat of violence within the content of the story; in short to reinforce the ‘blackness’ of the story or character who is black within the story. An interesting representation of this paradigm can be seen in John Carpenter’s masterpiece remake of Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film THE THING (1982) where Stevie Wonder’s song, “Superstition” is associated with the black character, Nauls (T.C. Carter).
5) The dramatic creation of black characters limited by the dual nature of African-American realist tendencies which can be categorized by the antinomies listed: street/decent, ghetto/bourgeois, lower class/middle class, urban/rural, northern/southern, west coast/east coast, dark skinned/light skinned, house nigger/field nigger… In effect, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to write of black characters as: scientists (although there are many), world explorers, fantasy heroes (African folklore), astronauts, spies, revolutionaries, Presidents, kings, queens, mythological heroes, gods, conquerors, oracles, geniuses, madmen, composers and virtuosos. We are chained to a limited perception of whether the black character is from the ‘hood or from the affluent suburbs and this leads to a singular dramatic conflict between the ‘hood character and the bourgeois character.
These aspects, taken together, constrict the variation in narrative style and severely limit the content of many African-American filmmaker’s works by coercing African-American audiences to expect these particular aspects in films so that they might identify with the characters and the circumstances and thus signify the film as a true representation. Moreover, African-American filmmakers, either out of fear of not attaining financing for their work or being simply oblivious to these restrictions because they themselves see the limitations as true, don’t utilize alternative formal strategies to challenge these representations. Among the ways in which we know that this realist tendency constricts African-American filmmakers in both the form and content of their work is the fact that we have yet to successfully produce a feature length African-American science fiction or fantasy film. These genres are in themselves antithetical to the various aspects of the realist tendency that I have just described. How can we ever know what freedom is if we don’t believe it to be true or an actual aspect of our racial identity and social realities?
Having described what I assert are some of the major aspects of a realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics, the second part of this essay will endeavor to suggest various formal strategies African-American filmmakers who want make challenging films with unique and distinctive narrative and cinematic styles might utilize to go beyond these restrictions in the representation of race in the cinema. Yet, to make these suggestions I will have to do what is thought of as untenable in most discussions of African-American film aesthetics. I will have to draw on the work of white American, European and foreign filmmakers and/or theorists. Such suggestions that draw on the work of whites are often perceived by many black film scholars, critics and theorists as an attempt to,” use the Hollywood tradition and its system of ideological supports as the basis for evaluating black filmmaking.” (4) That is to say, that previous black scholarship and criticism’s conceptualization of what constitutes ‘white cinema’ does not distinctly differentiate among Hollywood, European, and foreign filmmakers, but instead groups all non-black filmmakers as part of the conspiracy of global white supremacy in the cinema. But as I attempted to reveal in a new chapter called,” Race Traitors: White Filmmakers Who Make Black Films,” in the second edition of my book, SLAVE CINEMA, there were and still are many white American and European filmmakers who challenge conventional racial representations via the formal organization of their films which include African-American actors and/or themes.
A major mistake in my opinion in African-American film criticism and scholarship is the presumption that film form is as racially coded as film content. That, for example, the incendiary racism that constitutes D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) extends beyond the racist content and taints the formal cinematic language and editorial structure of the film. Yet, the fact that Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the form and structure of BIRTH OF A NATION and other white capitalist American filmmaker’s work in their apprehension of film form provides some evidence to disprove that the cinema’s formal language is inherently racist. In short, the point-of-view shot sequence is not racist and is an integral aspect of filmic narration, but rather the point of view of the filmmaker and the content he creates can be explicitly racist. This is why the second part of this essay will concentrate on what I believe to be the originating sources of African-American critical analysis of racial representation (or content) and the conflation of film form and racist film content and this error has contributed to the realist tendency in African-American film aesthetics. As we shall see, it is not just content that African-American filmmakers must manipulate to challenge racial, ideological and political regimes, but also the formal organization of their films must be aggressively manipulated to challenge their audiences.
Two
The near exclusive concentration on film content (story, characters, stereotypes, structured absence, music soundtrack) in African-American film aesthetics as opposed to film form (narrative style/dynamism, film language, mise-en-scene, editing, shot selection, sound, film score) has two powerful originating factors:
1) The African-American critical reaction against D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
2) Network television shows from the 1950’s (The Jack Benny Show, Beulah), 60’s (I Spy, Julia), 70’s (Alex Haley’s Roots Mini-series, The Jeffersons, Good Times), 80’s (The Cosby Show), and 90’s (Fresh Prince, Living Single, etc).
In one of the earliest African-American critiques of the film BIRTH OF A NATION Lawrence Reddick describes the film’s dissonant duality,” From a strictly artistic and technical point of view,” he writes,” it was a masterpiece of conception and structure. Even today, it is important from this angle.” Nevertheless, Reddick points out,” Birth of a Nation has remained, without question, the most vicious anti-negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”(5) In our abhorrence of the content of BIRTH OF A NATION and its political utility (increasing both KKK membership and lynchings of blacks during and after its initial release) African-American critics and filmmakers were reluctant to appreciate the form of the film as they attacked how the film represented African-Americans. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult to appreciate the form of this film since the content attacks us as a people with its blackface caricatures and its racially derogatory themes presented via a sophisticated narrative structure and formal technique. To this effect, when Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the film they were not affected by its racist content and so the formal structure and narrative style of the film was not obstructed and contributed to their aesthetic theories on film and the development of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories on montage.
Rather than discuss Billy Bitzer’s mobile camera, panoramic long shots, night cinematography, panning shots, soft focus and diffuse lighting techniques, or Griffith’s parallel editing, layered mise-en-scene, the use of the fade out to end a scene, iris shots and close ups in BIRTH OF A NATION, African-American critics aimed their outrage at the content of the film because of the urgency of the political situation that the film was abetting: anti-Negro sentiment in the form of lynchings and as a KKK recruitment tool. In my opinion it was this, important and necessary, outrage at the content of BIRTH OF A NATION that led many contemporary and later African-American critics to conflate classical Hollywood film form with racist film content. As Vincent F. Rocchio asserts in his book,’ Reel Racism,’ concerning his critique of the film,” By subordinating the aesthetics of the film to its rhetoric,” he will,” demonstrate that the film’s participation in racism as a signifying process cannot be made distinct from the film, and that indeed, without its racism, the film would not have the status it has today.”(6) Thus by conflating form with content, African-American critics equated the formal techniques and narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood cinema’s use of the cinematic language with the racist rhetoric of the dominate culture.
In short: How the story is told is as racist as What the story has told; the classical narrative structure is as racist as the story; the cinematic form is as racist as the anti-negro content. The question I am begging here is: Is an art-form racist or is a person racist who uses an art-form to communicate a racist idea? It is imperative, if we as African-American filmmakers and critics want to challenge the realist tendency in African-American film, that we appreciate the difference between the narrative and the story. The narrative is the way that the story has been told. The story is what has been told or simply the content of the narrative. A story in the art form of film can be told in many different ways. It is my contention that African-American film critics, scholars and filmmakers give primacy to the content of the film art and not the formal techniques and narrative structure of the film art and that this critical error began with the important and necessary outrage against D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
The other contributing factor to the near exclusive concern with film content by African-Americans was described in the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, as The Five Errors that Constrict African-American Cinematic Style:
“By far the most important contributing factor, if not the sole factor, is television- particularly network television which we might consider ‘the poor man’s cinema’. Because network television is freely broadcast and readily available to nearly all classes and castes of people, the rudimentary use of cinematic technique in television studio shows, sit-coms, soap operas and weekly dramatic series is generally understood as a standardized technique of cinematic expression. Network television is the baseline through which all other cinematic techniques are measured, by default. “(pgs. 91-92)
Some of the most culturally specific and racially galvanizing content that has garnered the greatest numbers of African-American audiences has appeared on network television. In the early days of the medium there were servant roles like that of Rochester (Eddie Anderson) on The Jack Benny Show and the multiple black actresses (Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers) that tackled the show Beulah about a maid who was “Queen of the Kitchen”. In the 1960’s after almost 5 years of bit parts in Westerns and failed variety shows like The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, the latter half of that decade saw the casting of Bill Cosby in the espionage series, I Spy and the success of Julia and Room 222. Later in the 1970’s there were the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin sit-coms, The Jeffersons and Good Times coupled with other shows like, Sanford & Son,” that, by and large, operat[ed] under the creative control and direction of white studio and network executives.”(7) The 70’s culminated with the production and broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots mini-series which,” brought to millions of Americans, for the first time, the story of the horrors of slavery and the noble struggles of black Americans.” (8) Yet as Herman Gray deftly points out:
” This powerful television epic effectively constructed the story of American slavery from the stage of emotional identifications and attachments to individual characters, family struggles, and the realization of the American dream. Consequently, the social organization of racial subordination, the cultural reliance on human degradation, and the economic exploitation of black labor receded almost completely from the story. And, of course, this quality is precisely what made the television series such a huge success.” (9)
If we continue in succession, the 1980’s gave us among other hit black sit-coms like The Cosby Show and in the 1990’s we had shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Living Single, Moesha and others that represented the,” interiority of black life on American Network Television.”(10) Therefore when I say that African-American critics and filmmakers are fixated on film content, I am really pointing out that they are fixated on black representation on screen; the positive and ideal representations of our race and culture that if not truly authentic in its depth and complexity, then at least these representations conform to what we need to believe is true about our race and our social realities.
If BIRTH OF A NATION implanted a derogatory representation of African-Americans in the cinema at the beginning of cinema history, then network television concerned itself solely with modulating representations of blackness as blacks moved from second class citizenship to equal citizenship through the decades. We can trace these modulating representations of blackness from the servant roles of the 1950’s, to the ‘race neutral’ professionals of the 60’s, to Roots and the bourgeois family ideals of the 70’s to the affluence and ideals of bourgeois self-sufficiency of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Yet, all this is to say that the African-American fixation of racial representation, or filmic content, has obscured the fact that all representation is constructed and that to expose, question, or challenge the ideological, sociological and political forces that affect us- one must deploy alternative formal strategies and non-classical narrative techniques in specific films or television series that encourage the spectators to become critical observers rather than “signifying monkeys” attempting to deceive the lion of the white controlled entertainment industry, but ultimately falling victim to its persuasive power.
The fixation on content or racial representation has standardized African-American film aesthetics in such a way that form is made ‘invisible’ as a means to 1) reach the broadest African-American audience possible (as determined by network television standards) and 2) the representation of race is constructed to optimize maximum audience emotional identification (as determined by both network television and classical Hollywood narration). The overall effect of these means is that through the emotional attachment with individual characters and/or family struggles cinematic form is not used to question, challenge or expose the “American dream” or the ideological, political or social forces that shape these representations and make them palatable to a broad audience. Thus, one cannot question the circumstances as to why,’ The Fresh Prince,’ had to move to luxurious and wealthy,‘ Bel Air,’ from the violent gang and drug infested streets of West Philadelphia, for to do so would ruin the comedy of the situation. Make no mistake, I believe that to broaden the boundaries of ‘blackness’ one has to question the authenticity of the very representations to which we so strongly identify. And the most effective way to question racial representations is through the formal and narrative organization of the film.
I will give a list of these standardized narrative and formal structures and techniques below:
1) The Linear Narrative: In general, a story proceeds from beginning to end in a forward chronological progression. Rarely are alternative narrative strategies deployed in African-American film such as those I detail in my book, Screenwriting Into Film: Forgotten Methods & New Possibilities (2008). The non-linear narrative (moving forwards and backwards in time), Discovery narrative (a ruse played on a character), Seduction narrative (a ruse played on the audience) or Conceptual narrative (a metaphor or allegory that critiques contemporary ruling social, political, racial or ideological positions).(11)
2) Acting is determined by standards of African-American duality (decent/street; hood/bourgeois, etc) and emotional identification is achieved through idealized therapeutic dialogue where characters reveal their emotions or thoughts verbally for the benefit of the expectant audience. The popularity of Tyler Perry’s films is based in no small part on this African-American duality, emotional identification and idealized therapeutic dialogue.
The rest of these standardizations in the use of film form by many African-American filmmakers are listed directly from the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American (pgs. 91-142):
3) The camera must stay on the person who is talking, resulting in an overdependence upon the medium shot for dialogue involving two or more persons and the “dragnet” editorial technique. The medium shot is used to keep all of the dialogue and the performances of the actors intact, like a stage play, and provides an economical way to shoot by reducing the amount of editing needed to put the film together. The downside is that a majority of African-American filmmakers lack a distinctive style when they follow this model. The “dragnet” editorial technique is a technique where the editing is controlled by who is talking and the camera must stay on the face of the talker and not the listener. This editorial technique was described and named by famed editor, Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye 2nd edition.
4) Professional lighting is lighting that is evenly spread out over an entire set or location. A professional technique ‘borrowed’ from studio television where lighting has to kept at a certain ‘broadcast standard’ instead of an artistic standard. When lighting is approached as a means to allow the audience to see every object or person clearly in a scene (pending the story and theme of course) we have effectively rendered lighting mute as a means of cinematic expression.
5) An overdependence on the music soundtrack or music score which ruins pacing and disguises plot holes or story incongruities. Since music is considered African-American’s first art we often expend more time and effort on the selection and production of the soundtrack than we do the story, narrative structure and formal methods of the film. The film art is held in a subordinate position relative to the art of music. The very notion of making a film without music (say as Alfred Hitchcock did with his film THE BIRDS- 1963) would be unthinkable to many African-American filmmakers, if simply because we often use film as a means to hear music as opposed to using music as a means to see what’s not in the film. An example would be Bernard Herrmann’s use of shrieking violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) shower murder scene in which we actually never see a knife penetrate the flesh of the victim, but the music makes us see what is not in the film.
6) A lack of the use of montage [as described and deployed by Russian film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and many other American and foreign filmmakers after him] as an editorial strategy to demonstrate a theme or expand the boundaries of a story. Associational montage where different scenes are intercut together to make a larger commentary within a story is rarely utilized in African-American film aesthetics. In my book I used the example from Francis Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972) where the baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew was intercut with the killing of all of the heads of the five mafia families. It is a sequence that expands the boundaries of the crime story to comment on the fact that mob violence is ritualized violence that must occur,” every five or six years,” to change or consolidate power.
7) An afro-centric refusal to either watch or incorporate the narrative advances and/or cinematic techniques of international film artists past or present. Since film is and has always been an international art form we cannot afford to keep thinking of ‘black film’ as in a vacuum. Our films are watched overseas just as we watch foreign films; ideas are and must be shared. The notion of ‘black elitism’ where the other African-Americans who are not in your present company are somehow stupider than you, is one of the means through which we self-censor our ideas. By believing that ‘other blacks’ won’t get it and since black film only appeals to ‘other blacks’ it’s better to keep ideas, stories, characters, and plots as simple and identifiable as possible to gain the most box office success at the expense of artistic style and integrity.
Yet the question still remains: How do we encourage spectators to become critical observers? By what alternative formal strategies can we encourage spectators to become critical observers instead of becoming emotionally identified with characters and circumstances to the point that they are only signifying that a specific representation appears authentic instead of questioning the social, political or ideological forces that are creating those circumstances? One method through which the encouragement of critical observation can be done is through alienation, distanciation and defamiliarizing techniques and strategies first advocated by German playwright and theater director Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and later transposed and deployed by a variety of different filmmakers like German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, American filmmakers Charles Burnett (THE KILLER OF SHEEP- 1977) and Lance Hammer (BALLAST – 2008). In the following section rather than discuss all of these different techniques and strategies I would like to concentrate on their overall effect which is to ‘defamiliarize’ that which we have come to take for granted in how the world, and by extension our race, is represented on screen.
NOTES
(1)Soviet Realism was a government sanctioned form of artistic censorship beginning in 1929,” which idealized the Soviet experience in order to inspire the masses with the glories of life under Lenin and Stalin,” under this limited ideological perspective,” the genius of the Soviet cinema was devastated, since anything unique, personal, or formally experimental was explicitly forbidden to appear upon the screen.” (194, A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook, 1981, Norton & Company; New York.)
(2) http://www.detnews.com/article/20110814/METRO/108140312/15-shot--including-6-dead--in-Detroit-in-24-hours Detroit News.com download date August 16th, 2011
(3) To be more accurate, we should perhaps start with the killing of the “Cochise” (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) character in Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (1975).
(4) pg. 113, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition by Gladstone L. Yearwood, African World Press: Trenton, New Jersey, 2000.
(5) Pg. 286, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909-1949 by Anna Everett, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
(6) Pg. 30, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture
by Vincent F. Rocchio, Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.
(7) pg. 71, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness by Herman Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Ibid, pg. 78
(9) Ibid, pg. 78
(10) Ibid, pg. xxi
(11) Here are some of the films that illustrate these types of narrative structures: Linear: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989-Spike Lee), VIVRE SA VIE (1962- Jean-Luc Godard; Non-linear : THE LAST EMPEROR (1987 theatrical release- Bernardo Bertolucci), AMORES PERROS(2000- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Discovery Narrative: TRAINING DAY (2001- Antoine Fuqua), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968- Roman Polanski); Seduction Narrative: THE SIXTH SENSE (1999- M. Night Shyamalan), PSYCHO (1960- Alfred Hitchcock); Conceptual Narrative: ENTER THE VOID (2009- Gaspar Noe), TEOREMA (1968- Pier Paolo Pasolini)
The near exclusive concentration on film content (story, characters, stereotypes, structured absence, music soundtrack) in African-American film aesthetics as opposed to film form (narrative style/dynamism, film language, mise-en-scene, editing, shot selection, sound, film score) has two powerful originating factors:
1) The African-American critical reaction against D. W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
2) Network television shows from the 1950’s (The Jack Benny Show, Beulah), 60’s (I Spy, Julia), 70’s (Alex Haley’s Roots Mini-series, The Jeffersons, Good Times), 80’s (The Cosby Show), and 90’s (Fresh Prince, Living Single, etc).
In one of the earliest African-American critiques of the film BIRTH OF A NATION Lawrence Reddick describes the film’s dissonant duality,” From a strictly artistic and technical point of view,” he writes,” it was a masterpiece of conception and structure. Even today, it is important from this angle.” Nevertheless, Reddick points out,” Birth of a Nation has remained, without question, the most vicious anti-negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”(5) In our abhorrence of the content of BIRTH OF A NATION and its political utility (increasing both KKK membership and lynchings of blacks during and after its initial release) African-American critics and filmmakers were reluctant to appreciate the form of the film as they attacked how the film represented African-Americans. Admittedly, it would have been extremely difficult to appreciate the form of this film since the content attacks us as a people with its blackface caricatures and its racially derogatory themes presented via a sophisticated narrative structure and formal technique. To this effect, when Russian film theorists and filmmakers studied the film they were not affected by its racist content and so the formal structure and narrative style of the film was not obstructed and contributed to their aesthetic theories on film and the development of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories on montage.
Rather than discuss Billy Bitzer’s mobile camera, panoramic long shots, night cinematography, panning shots, soft focus and diffuse lighting techniques, or Griffith’s parallel editing, layered mise-en-scene, the use of the fade out to end a scene, iris shots and close ups in BIRTH OF A NATION, African-American critics aimed their outrage at the content of the film because of the urgency of the political situation that the film was abetting: anti-Negro sentiment in the form of lynchings and as a KKK recruitment tool. In my opinion it was this, important and necessary, outrage at the content of BIRTH OF A NATION that led many contemporary and later African-American critics to conflate classical Hollywood film form with racist film content. As Vincent F. Rocchio asserts in his book,’ Reel Racism,’ concerning his critique of the film,” By subordinating the aesthetics of the film to its rhetoric,” he will,” demonstrate that the film’s participation in racism as a signifying process cannot be made distinct from the film, and that indeed, without its racism, the film would not have the status it has today.”(6) Thus by conflating form with content, African-American critics equated the formal techniques and narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood cinema’s use of the cinematic language with the racist rhetoric of the dominate culture.
In short: How the story is told is as racist as What the story has told; the classical narrative structure is as racist as the story; the cinematic form is as racist as the anti-negro content. The question I am begging here is: Is an art-form racist or is a person racist who uses an art-form to communicate a racist idea? It is imperative, if we as African-American filmmakers and critics want to challenge the realist tendency in African-American film, that we appreciate the difference between the narrative and the story. The narrative is the way that the story has been told. The story is what has been told or simply the content of the narrative. A story in the art form of film can be told in many different ways. It is my contention that African-American film critics, scholars and filmmakers give primacy to the content of the film art and not the formal techniques and narrative structure of the film art and that this critical error began with the important and necessary outrage against D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915.
The other contributing factor to the near exclusive concern with film content by African-Americans was described in the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American in Film, as The Five Errors that Constrict African-American Cinematic Style:
“By far the most important contributing factor, if not the sole factor, is television- particularly network television which we might consider ‘the poor man’s cinema’. Because network television is freely broadcast and readily available to nearly all classes and castes of people, the rudimentary use of cinematic technique in television studio shows, sit-coms, soap operas and weekly dramatic series is generally understood as a standardized technique of cinematic expression. Network television is the baseline through which all other cinematic techniques are measured, by default. “(pgs. 91-92)
Some of the most culturally specific and racially galvanizing content that has garnered the greatest numbers of African-American audiences has appeared on network television. In the early days of the medium there were servant roles like that of Rochester (Eddie Anderson) on The Jack Benny Show and the multiple black actresses (Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers) that tackled the show Beulah about a maid who was “Queen of the Kitchen”. In the 1960’s after almost 5 years of bit parts in Westerns and failed variety shows like The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, the latter half of that decade saw the casting of Bill Cosby in the espionage series, I Spy and the success of Julia and Room 222. Later in the 1970’s there were the Norman Lear/Bud Yorkin sit-coms, The Jeffersons and Good Times coupled with other shows like, Sanford & Son,” that, by and large, operat[ed] under the creative control and direction of white studio and network executives.”(7) The 70’s culminated with the production and broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots mini-series which,” brought to millions of Americans, for the first time, the story of the horrors of slavery and the noble struggles of black Americans.” (8) Yet as Herman Gray deftly points out:
” This powerful television epic effectively constructed the story of American slavery from the stage of emotional identifications and attachments to individual characters, family struggles, and the realization of the American dream. Consequently, the social organization of racial subordination, the cultural reliance on human degradation, and the economic exploitation of black labor receded almost completely from the story. And, of course, this quality is precisely what made the television series such a huge success.” (9)
If we continue in succession, the 1980’s gave us among other hit black sit-coms like The Cosby Show and in the 1990’s we had shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Living Single, Moesha and others that represented the,” interiority of black life on American Network Television.”(10) Therefore when I say that African-American critics and filmmakers are fixated on film content, I am really pointing out that they are fixated on black representation on screen; the positive and ideal representations of our race and culture that if not truly authentic in its depth and complexity, then at least these representations conform to what we need to believe is true about our race and our social realities.
If BIRTH OF A NATION implanted a derogatory representation of African-Americans in the cinema at the beginning of cinema history, then network television concerned itself solely with modulating representations of blackness as blacks moved from second class citizenship to equal citizenship through the decades. We can trace these modulating representations of blackness from the servant roles of the 1950’s, to the ‘race neutral’ professionals of the 60’s, to Roots and the bourgeois family ideals of the 70’s to the affluence and ideals of bourgeois self-sufficiency of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Yet, all this is to say that the African-American fixation of racial representation, or filmic content, has obscured the fact that all representation is constructed and that to expose, question, or challenge the ideological, sociological and political forces that affect us- one must deploy alternative formal strategies and non-classical narrative techniques in specific films or television series that encourage the spectators to become critical observers rather than “signifying monkeys” attempting to deceive the lion of the white controlled entertainment industry, but ultimately falling victim to its persuasive power.
The fixation on content or racial representation has standardized African-American film aesthetics in such a way that form is made ‘invisible’ as a means to 1) reach the broadest African-American audience possible (as determined by network television standards) and 2) the representation of race is constructed to optimize maximum audience emotional identification (as determined by both network television and classical Hollywood narration). The overall effect of these means is that through the emotional attachment with individual characters and/or family struggles cinematic form is not used to question, challenge or expose the “American dream” or the ideological, political or social forces that shape these representations and make them palatable to a broad audience. Thus, one cannot question the circumstances as to why,’ The Fresh Prince,’ had to move to luxurious and wealthy,‘ Bel Air,’ from the violent gang and drug infested streets of West Philadelphia, for to do so would ruin the comedy of the situation. Make no mistake, I believe that to broaden the boundaries of ‘blackness’ one has to question the authenticity of the very representations to which we so strongly identify. And the most effective way to question racial representations is through the formal and narrative organization of the film.
I will give a list of these standardized narrative and formal structures and techniques below:
1) The Linear Narrative: In general, a story proceeds from beginning to end in a forward chronological progression. Rarely are alternative narrative strategies deployed in African-American film such as those I detail in my book, Screenwriting Into Film: Forgotten Methods & New Possibilities (2008). The non-linear narrative (moving forwards and backwards in time), Discovery narrative (a ruse played on a character), Seduction narrative (a ruse played on the audience) or Conceptual narrative (a metaphor or allegory that critiques contemporary ruling social, political, racial or ideological positions).(11)
2) Acting is determined by standards of African-American duality (decent/street; hood/bourgeois, etc) and emotional identification is achieved through idealized therapeutic dialogue where characters reveal their emotions or thoughts verbally for the benefit of the expectant audience. The popularity of Tyler Perry’s films is based in no small part on this African-American duality, emotional identification and idealized therapeutic dialogue.
The rest of these standardizations in the use of film form by many African-American filmmakers are listed directly from the third chapter of my book, SLAVE CINEMA: The Crisis of the African-American (pgs. 91-142):
3) The camera must stay on the person who is talking, resulting in an overdependence upon the medium shot for dialogue involving two or more persons and the “dragnet” editorial technique. The medium shot is used to keep all of the dialogue and the performances of the actors intact, like a stage play, and provides an economical way to shoot by reducing the amount of editing needed to put the film together. The downside is that a majority of African-American filmmakers lack a distinctive style when they follow this model. The “dragnet” editorial technique is a technique where the editing is controlled by who is talking and the camera must stay on the face of the talker and not the listener. This editorial technique was described and named by famed editor, Walter Murch in his book, In The Blink of an Eye 2nd edition.
4) Professional lighting is lighting that is evenly spread out over an entire set or location. A professional technique ‘borrowed’ from studio television where lighting has to kept at a certain ‘broadcast standard’ instead of an artistic standard. When lighting is approached as a means to allow the audience to see every object or person clearly in a scene (pending the story and theme of course) we have effectively rendered lighting mute as a means of cinematic expression.
5) An overdependence on the music soundtrack or music score which ruins pacing and disguises plot holes or story incongruities. Since music is considered African-American’s first art we often expend more time and effort on the selection and production of the soundtrack than we do the story, narrative structure and formal methods of the film. The film art is held in a subordinate position relative to the art of music. The very notion of making a film without music (say as Alfred Hitchcock did with his film THE BIRDS- 1963) would be unthinkable to many African-American filmmakers, if simply because we often use film as a means to hear music as opposed to using music as a means to see what’s not in the film. An example would be Bernard Herrmann’s use of shrieking violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) shower murder scene in which we actually never see a knife penetrate the flesh of the victim, but the music makes us see what is not in the film.
6) A lack of the use of montage [as described and deployed by Russian film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and many other American and foreign filmmakers after him] as an editorial strategy to demonstrate a theme or expand the boundaries of a story. Associational montage where different scenes are intercut together to make a larger commentary within a story is rarely utilized in African-American film aesthetics. In my book I used the example from Francis Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972) where the baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew was intercut with the killing of all of the heads of the five mafia families. It is a sequence that expands the boundaries of the crime story to comment on the fact that mob violence is ritualized violence that must occur,” every five or six years,” to change or consolidate power.
7) An afro-centric refusal to either watch or incorporate the narrative advances and/or cinematic techniques of international film artists past or present. Since film is and has always been an international art form we cannot afford to keep thinking of ‘black film’ as in a vacuum. Our films are watched overseas just as we watch foreign films; ideas are and must be shared. The notion of ‘black elitism’ where the other African-Americans who are not in your present company are somehow stupider than you, is one of the means through which we self-censor our ideas. By believing that ‘other blacks’ won’t get it and since black film only appeals to ‘other blacks’ it’s better to keep ideas, stories, characters, and plots as simple and identifiable as possible to gain the most box office success at the expense of artistic style and integrity.
Yet the question still remains: How do we encourage spectators to become critical observers? By what alternative formal strategies can we encourage spectators to become critical observers instead of becoming emotionally identified with characters and circumstances to the point that they are only signifying that a specific representation appears authentic instead of questioning the social, political or ideological forces that are creating those circumstances? One method through which the encouragement of critical observation can be done is through alienation, distanciation and defamiliarizing techniques and strategies first advocated by German playwright and theater director Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) and later transposed and deployed by a variety of different filmmakers like German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, American filmmakers Charles Burnett (THE KILLER OF SHEEP- 1977) and Lance Hammer (BALLAST – 2008). In the following section rather than discuss all of these different techniques and strategies I would like to concentrate on their overall effect which is to ‘defamiliarize’ that which we have come to take for granted in how the world, and by extension our race, is represented on screen.
NOTES
(1)Soviet Realism was a government sanctioned form of artistic censorship beginning in 1929,” which idealized the Soviet experience in order to inspire the masses with the glories of life under Lenin and Stalin,” under this limited ideological perspective,” the genius of the Soviet cinema was devastated, since anything unique, personal, or formally experimental was explicitly forbidden to appear upon the screen.” (194, A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook, 1981, Norton & Company; New York.)
(2) http://www.detnews.com/article/20110814/METRO/108140312/15-shot--including-6-dead--in-Detroit-in-24-hours Detroit News.com download date August 16th, 2011
(3) To be more accurate, we should perhaps start with the killing of the “Cochise” (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) character in Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (1975).
(4) pg. 113, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition by Gladstone L. Yearwood, African World Press: Trenton, New Jersey, 2000.
(5) Pg. 286, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909-1949 by Anna Everett, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
(6) Pg. 30, Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture
by Vincent F. Rocchio, Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.
(7) pg. 71, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness by Herman Gray, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Ibid, pg. 78
(9) Ibid, pg. 78
(10) Ibid, pg. xxi
(11) Here are some of the films that illustrate these types of narrative structures: Linear: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989-Spike Lee), VIVRE SA VIE (1962- Jean-Luc Godard; Non-linear : THE LAST EMPEROR (1987 theatrical release- Bernardo Bertolucci), AMORES PERROS(2000- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Discovery Narrative: TRAINING DAY (2001- Antoine Fuqua), ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968- Roman Polanski); Seduction Narrative: THE SIXTH SENSE (1999- M. Night Shyamalan), PSYCHO (1960- Alfred Hitchcock); Conceptual Narrative: ENTER THE VOID (2009- Gaspar Noe), TEOREMA (1968- Pier Paolo Pasolini)
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